Witnessed
by KelseyGallant
Summary: After thirteen years of trying to figure out the significance of the mysterious plane that appeared during her one day at Sky Trails, Angela finally has an opportunity to get some answers. But what will it lead to? Has her life been ruined forever? 'Witnessed' brings you the entire Missing series, from Angela's perspective.
1. Chapter 1

_December 1999_

It had been a very weird night.

Angela DuPre flopped down on the bed in her apartment and closed her eyes. Maybe when she opened them, she would find that her entire first day working for Sky Trails Air had been a dream. That was most likely the case. Everything that had happened was so weird, there was no way it really could have happened.

Angela kept her eyes closed for a couple minutes, trying to go to sleep. But the events of earlier that day kept coming back to her.

The plane appearing out of nowhere.

The dark cockpit.

The changing logo.

The babies. Rows and rows of no one but babies, filling every seat on the plane.

The entire airport buzzing with government agents and officials of every kind.

The brigade of airport employees, including Angela herself, carrying a total of thirty-six babies off the plane.

The entire plane disappearing into thin air.

It had to be a dream. _Had_ to be.

The FBI officials had swarmed onto the scene. Angela had had to re-tell the story of what she'd seen, over and over and over again. She knew what she had seen. But every time she re-told the story, the officials' faces had started looking more and more skeptical. Monique Waters, her supervisor, who'd been working next to Angela and had also seen the plane disappear, had insisted that Angela was crazy. Then the FBI had run around trying to convince everyone that everything was under control, that they had towed the plane away and were in the process of examining it to find out where it had come from.

It was all a lie. The plane—the entire plane—had disappeared as soon as the employees had finished carrying the babies into the terminal. Angela had _seen_ it. She had told everyone who interviewed her the truth. But nobody had believed her.

Or at least, nobody wanted to _admit_ that they believed her.

And now, because of that plane and because Angela refused to lie about what she had seen, Angela was without a job. She fought back a lump in her throat as she thought back to just twelve hours earlier. She'd been so excited for her first real job at an airport. That was why she'd moved to Liston in the first place—to work at the Liston airport, the first airport that had offered her a job. She remembered checking her reflection over and over in the mirror. _Do I look the part of airline customer service representative? How does my uniform look? It's not wrinkled, right? Do I look professional?_

Angela hadn't had to fake her big, welcoming smile—at least not at first. She had just been so excited to finally be working at an actual airport. It was a small step, but it was one step closer to her goal of becoming a pilot.

Could people still become pilots if the official government documents said they were mentally unstable and prone to hallucinations?

The FBI and Sky Trails Air had made everyone sign confidentiality statements, saying they would never talk about the incident again. Angela had refused. She'd stuck to her story—the _truth_. Then Monique— _who'd seen the plane disappear just like Angela had!—_ had fired her and filled out all sorts of documents about how Angela was too mentally disabled and crazy to work for an airline.

And just like that, Angela had lost her job.

Everyone would be so disappointed in her. What was she supposed to do now? She'd moved a hundred miles away from the town she'd grown up in to take this job. What would her parents say if she came back and told them she'd lost her job after only one day?

It was easier to believe it had all been a dream. A nightmare.

But for some reason, Angela couldn't seem to wake up.


	2. Chapter 2

Angela wasn't sure how long she lay on her bed, pondering the events of the day, before she decided to get up and change out of her Sky Trails uniform. She tried not to let her emotions get the best of her as she hung it up on its hanger in the closet, where she guessed it would have to stay forever now. Her one souvenir from her one day at her first real job. So crisp and clean and new…

But wait. What was in the pocket? Paper? Was this where that Post-it note had gone, the one she'd been looking for earlier and couldn't seem to find? The day had quickly gone from exciting and adventurous to crazy and hectic—and that was before the mysterious plane had arrived. Angela had been frazzled since her first minute on the job, when Monique had yelled at her for moving a piece of paper two inches across the counter. And then it had just been a blur of customers, Monique yelling, and Angela struggling to try and keep up.

Angela reached into the pocket of her uniform and pulled the object out. It was not a post-it note. It was a folded piece of white printer paper, ripped at the edges. And in big letters, it held the words _DO NOT OPEN FOR ANOTHER TWELVE YEARS, ELEVEN MONTHS_.

Angela exhaled and sat down on the edge of her bed, holding the note. Now she remembered where it had come from, sort of. At some point before the mysterious plane had arrived—maybe an hour earlier? Half an hour? Ten minutes?—some random kid had come up to Angela and given her the paper. He wasn't anybody she knew, but he'd known her name. And what had he said about the paper? That it was important, right? And something really weird. That she would understand it later?

Maybe "later" had meant after the plane had appeared out of thin air. Was this note going to explain everything? Did it hold a logical explanation for a plane that could appear and disappear into nothingness, and that carried only babies? Would she be able to show this note to the FBI as proof that she wasn't crazy?

Angela gingerly unfolded the paper, ignoring the instructions on the outside. Why would she wait for twelve years and eleven months to read the note that might be able to tell her everything she needed to know tonight? Why would someone even want her to wait twelve years and eleven months to read it, anyway? What was the significance of that number? Was it supposed to be a code or something?

Angela opened the note all the way and read the first two words.

 _Dear Angela,_

Angela's breath caught in her throat. The note-writer knew her by name. Was it that kid? The one who'd delivered the note? Or had he just been delivering it for someone else? She tried to remember what he had looked like. He'd been around middle-school age, she was pretty sure. Twelve or thirteen or fourteen. And he'd been wearing something weird—though Angela no longer remembered what it looked like, only that it had been unusual. And hadn't he been carrying a baby?

Angela realized she was being silly. Maybe the boy had been playing a prank. Angela had been wearing a nametag, after all. Maybe he'd been bored waiting for his parents to finish getting their tickets or something, and he'd decided to play a joke on a frazzled, first-day employee. That seemed like something a teenage boy would do. Maybe the note didn't have anything at all to do with the plane.

There was one way to find out.

 _Dear Angela_ , she read. _You don't know me yet, and I can't explain much because that could mess up everything. You're going to see some strange stuff tonight that you won't understand for a long time. But I promise you, you will eventually. When you do, it's very important that you bring your own Elucidator the morning of November 21, 2012. Don't tell me or JB anything about your Elucidator that morning. Just have it with you. Also, when you see me again, don't say anything about getting this letter. But then, when you go back to 1932, meet me at the airfield where Charles Lindberg flies on the afternoon of August 15. Hide out of sight until you see me run out of the office. And then, as soon as you can get me away from Gary and Hodge, we can go rescue JB._

There was no signature.

Angela read the letter over and over and over, trying to gather meaning from it, trying to understand. One line jumped out at her the most: Y _ou're going to see some strange stuff tonight that you won't understand for a long time._ He had to be talking about the plane. But how did he know? Did he plan it? And how did he know that she wouldn't understand it for a long time? How long was a long time, anyway?

Angela's eyes flicked to the first date in the note: November 21, 2012. Mentally, she made the calculation. November 21, 2012 was twelve years and eleven months away. Just like the admonishment on the front of the note had said.

Angela looked at the other part where a date was mentioned. _When you go back to 1932_. What in the world was that supposed to mean? How could Angela go back to 1932? She hadn't even been born in 1932. And Charles Lindbergh? Angela was familiar with Charles Lindbergh's story—how he was the first American pilot to fly across the Atlantic ocean, how his son had been kidnapped as a baby, all that stuff—but she had no idea where he had flown on August 15, 1932.

What was an Elucidator?

Who was JB?

Who were Gary and Hodge?

Who had written the note?

Angela frowned as she read the letter a fourth time. She definitely wouldn't be showing this letter to the FBI. They'd probably take it as proof that she _was_ crazy. The note made no sense at all. It was probably a hoax. Probably just a bored teenage boy trying to have some fun. But Angela couldn't shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this note had something to do with the plane full of babies.

So she folded it up carefully and put it away in her wallet.


	3. Chapter 3

TWELVE YEARS, TEN MONTHS LATER— _October 2012_

It started as an ordinary day. There was nothing to distinguish October 2 from any other day of the past twelve years. Angela woke up and ate breakfast, then got to work on her research. She pored over textbooks, handwritten notes, and computer pages for hours, trying to find new patterns, things she hadn't noticed before. She cooked some dinner for herself, flipped through channels on the TV for a while, and then went back to researching.

And then the phone rang.

The fact that Angela's phone was ringing was weird in and of itself. Angela hardly ever talked to anyone on the phone. Her own family thought she was a nutcase, so they didn't talk to her much. She didn't have any close friends. She avoided putting her phone number on official documents if she could help it. And years ago, she'd had her number removed from all phone books and listings. Even telemarketers didn't call her now.

Maybe it was the lady from the physics department at MIT. The one who'd been avoiding Angela's calls for over a month now. Angela wasn't trying to be annoying; she was just trying to get some information. Maybe the lady had finally let up and was calling her back.

"Hello?" Angela spoke into the phone.

At first nobody responded. Then a nervous voice said, "Uh… Angela? Angela DuPre?"

"That's me," said Angela. "Who is this?"

"Um, my name is Chip Winston. I'm just calling because…well, I just had a couple questions I wanted to ask you?"

Angela had never heard of Chip Winston, and couldn't imagine how he'd gotten her number or why he wanted to talk to her. He sounded like a kid, so she was pretty sure he wasn't someone from the physics department at MIT or any other place she'd contacted for information. But Angela remained friendly and polite as she said, "Well… all right. Go ahead. What do you want to ask me?"

"Well," Chip began. "See, I'm thirteen years old, and I… I just found out I was adopted as a baby. I don't know anything about my birth parents, but, well, I kind of thought that you might know something…"

Angela's breath caught in her throat. She breathed in and found she wasn't breathing out. Was she hyperventilating? _Calm down_ , she told herself.

"I—I can't talk to you," she stammered. "Don't ever call me again. I'm sorry. Really, I am. I just—please don't call me. I can't talk to you." She hung up.

Instantly, she felt bad. Angela was not normally the kind of person who hung up on people. But she'd _had_ to hang up on Chip. Who knew who else could have been listening in to the phone call?

There had been one detail about that crazy night nearly thirteen years ago that Angela had almost forgotten about. But after five days of puzzling over what had happened and why, Angela had woken up in the middle of the night with the words from the strange logo running through her head: _Tachyon Travel_.

She'd gotten up immediately and booted up her computer. She had typed _tachyon travel_ into the Internet search bar, and results had pulled up about tachyons, theoretical particles that could travel faster than the speed of light.

The site had said that, theoretically, if tachyons were real, then time travel could potentially exist as well.

Time travel. 1932. 2012. _Do not open for another twelve years, eleven months._

It wasn't much, but it was a lead.

And it was the reason why Angela had spent the last twelve years and ten months researching physics. More specifically, everything she could find about tachyons, the speed of light, and time travel, but once she had exhausted those avenues, she'd turned to trying to understand all the complex workings of the universe. Einstein's theory of relativity. Quantum entanglement. Photons and matter and anti-matter. She'd read books and Web pages and taken college classes and gotten grants to perform in-depth studies. And all her research had eventually led to a theory about the plane and all the babies.

A theory that, if she could actually get anyone to believe her, could broaden perceptions of reality for the entire world.

Angela had checked her theory against all her information and calculations, and it made sense. She'd been so excited to share it with the FBI, with fellow physics researchers, with college professors, and with anyone and everyone who might listen and support her. At first she had contacted people all over the world, begging them to hear her story and listen to her theory. But just as when the plane had first appeared and she'd been trying to convince people of what she had seen, nobody had believed her. And this time around, she had unwittingly made a lot of enemies.

First of all, Sky Trails Air. They didn't like her talking about the incident because they thought it reflected badly on their company. Even though they'd gone bankrupt only three years after the incident, and the bankruptcy had nothing to do with Angela or the unidentified plane, some disgruntled employees still found reason to blame her.

The government was even worse. They'd basically blackmailed her to never speak about the incident again, to stop trying to get people to believe her theory. Angela was positive that the government had her phone tapped—either to get her in trouble for talking about her theory, or to eavesdrop and steal all her information to add to research of their own.

That was why she hadn't wanted to discuss the matter with Chip over the telephone. There was no telling who else might hear it.

Chip was thirteen years old and adopted. He had contacted her asking if she had information about his birth parents. She had no idea how he'd gotten her phone number, but still… didn't everything add up? Didn't it make sense that Chip had been one of the babies on the plane?

The more Angela thought about Chip, the more she realized that she really did want to talk to him. It was unlikely that he knew anything more than she did—after all, even if he had been one of the babies on the plane, he'd been a _baby_. It wasn't like he would remember it or anything. But what struck Angela the most about him was that he was on a search for information.

Angela knew what it was like to want information that nobody was willing or able to give her. Maybe she didn't know everything, but she could at least share with Chip what she did know. It was what she would have wanted someone to do for her.

Angela took a piece of white paper from her printer and sat down to write a note. She wasn't about to give Chip any information _in_ the note—notes could be intercepted. But she would offer to meet Chip somewhere—a public place, like the local library. And they could talk there.

As Angela started her note, she was suddenly hit by a surge of excitement. It was October 2, 2012. Since that night at the airport nearly thirteen years ago, Angela hadn't received any confirmation of her theory, or of time travel, or any news about the plane or the babies. She hadn't met anyone named JB or Gary or Hodge, and she still had no clue what an Elucidator was. And she was only a little bit closer to understanding than she'd been the night everything had happened.

But the note she'd received that night had said that she would understand everything eventually. It had also mentioned November 21, 2012.

That was just a little over a month away.

Was _Chip_ the note writer? Or would he be, at some point in the future once time travel had actually been discovered?

Maybe everything was finally going to fall into place.


	4. Chapter 4

Five days later, Angela was on her way to the Liston Public Library. In the note she'd sent Chip, she'd told him to meet her there at 3:00. She'd told him not to attempt to contact her in any other way. And he hadn't. Angela had no way of knowing whether Chip would actually show up. She had no way of knowing whether he had even gotten her note.

But if he had, she was almost certain he would come.

Angela arrived at the library at 2:00 sharp. She was _pretty_ sure this wasn't a trap, set up by the government or anybody else. But she had no way of knowing for sure. She wanted to be there early, just to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. Just to make sure she knew what she was getting herself into.

 _It'll be fine_ , she told herself. _Chip's just a kid. I'm not in danger. This isn't a trap. And even if it is, I'm prepared._ She clutched her purse tightly to her side. No one would suspect she had a Taser hidden in there. She would only use it if it was absolutely necessary. And it _wouldn't_ be. She would tell Chip what she knew and what she suspected, and he would tell her anything _he_ knew or suspected, and that would be that.

At 2:30, Angela spotted a group of kids coming into the library. Two boys and a girl. They tiptoed in as if on a secret mission, and headed straight to Conference Room B. The room where Angela had said she'd be willing to meet Chip.

One of those boys had to be Chip. And it looked like he had brought friends.

Angela watched as Chip and his friends prepared an elaborate setup for the meeting. One of the boys—Angela assumed it must be Chip—went into the conference room. The other boy went toward the non-fiction section, and the girl went over near the magazines. Chip—or whoever it was in the conference room—sat down with what looked like a cell phone in his lap, and started fiddling with it—probably calling or texting one of the other two. Sure enough, when Angela looked over at the girl, she was holding a cell phone to her ear, along with—was that a walkie-talkie?

Yes. The boy in the non-fiction section had a walkie talkie too.

Angela chuckled to herself. These kids were definitely bright. It was too bad, really, that she would have to break up their little setup. Just the cell phones may not be too bad. But walkie talkies… anyone could listen in.

Angela got up and walked over to the conference room. Chip looked up and saw her. "Oh, hello," he said, straightening up. "Are you the person who reserved this conference room for 3:00? The one who's willing to talk?"

Angela nodded. "Chip Winston?" she asked, just to make sure.

"Ye-e-es. And you are…?"

Angela didn't answer right away. She stepped into the room and looked over her shoulder at the other boy, the one in the nonfiction section. She laughed when she saw that the book he was pretending to read was upside-down. "Before we begin," she told Chip. "I'll have to ask you to turn that cell phone off. And tell your friends to turn off their walkie talkies. I appreciate their ingenuity, but they might as well come on in and listen in person."

Chip stammered that he had no idea what Angela was talking about, but Angela pointed out where the other two were and what they were doing. A moment later, the girl entered the room and introduced herself as Katherine Skidmore. Angela filed the name away in her memory.

"Come on, Jonah," said Katherine. "She's got us figured out."

Jonah. A J name. Did Jonah's last name begin with B? Could Jonah be the JB mentioned in the note?

Jonah seemed a lot more reluctant to enter the room than Katherine had been. "But I don't have to go in there, do I?" he asked. "I can stay out here if I want to. So I can run for help if anything happens."

Angela understood. She would be reluctant too, if she were in his situation. "You're the one I want guarding the door, then," she told Jonah. "Watching out for trouble. You can watch form the outside or watch from the inside. I don't care."

Jonah stepped a little closer, but didn't come into the room just yet. Angela introduced herself and held out her hand for Jonah to shake. He accepted it hesitantly, then joined Angela and the other kids in the conference room.

Angela sat in the seat that placed her back against the brick wall. The conference room was glass on three sides, so she wanted to be able to see if anyone else was coming. Chip and Katherine sat at the table, facing her. Jonah stood by the door.

"A little advice," Angela told the three of them. "Next time you do a stakeout, don't enter the building together." She explained that she had arrived early and had been watching them ever since they arrived. "I would have left you to your spy games if it weren't for the range on those things," she told them, gesturing to the walkie talkies. "I didn't want our conversation broadcast to every trucker passing by on the highway. Or… others who might want to listen."

"Oh, that's right," snapped Katherine. "You're afraid to even talk on the phone."

"I have my reasons," Angela told her.

"But it's safe to talk now?" asked Chip. "You can give us answers?"

Angela gave the area another look-over, making sure nobody else was nearby. "You're curious about your adoption, right?" she asked Chip. "What makes you think that I know anything about it?"

"Well…" said Chip with a glance at his friends. "A couple weeks ago, Jonah and Katherine went to the FBI to try to find out information about Jonah's adoption. And they didn't find out a lot, but they did find these lists, with names and addresses on them." He passed several sheets of paper over to Angela. "One was labeled _Survivors_ , and the other was labeled _Witnesses._ You were on the _Witnesses_ list. I'm on the _Survivors._ "

"See, Jonah's name is on the list of survivors too," Katherine added, pointing to a name toward the bottom of the list: Jonah Skidmore.

 _Oh. Skidmore. Same as Katherine_. Angela hadn't realized Jonah and Katherine were brother and sister. She smiled at Jonah, who looked slightly irritated as Katherine continued chattering on about how she wasn't on the list because she wasn't adopted, but how she'd been the one who had taken the pictures of the lists. _I guess this rules out my theory of Jonah being JB._

"I can tell you what I witnessed thirteen years ago," Angela told the children, after taking a look through both lists. Monique, her old boss, was on the _Witnesses_ list, but Angela didn't recognize any names on _Survivors_ beyond Jonah and Chip. "Even though I'm not supposed to discuss it with anyone. You'll probably think I'm crazy, anyhow."

"You know where I came from?" exclaimed Chip, leaning forward in his chair. "Where _we_ came from?"

This was the crucial moment. The moment when Angela would share her theory, and all three kids would probably start to think she was insane.

Angela shook her head slowly. "Not where, exactly. But I think I might have a pretty good guess about when."

" _When_?" Chip repeated. All three kids looked slightly dumbstruck.

"Oh, thanks," said Katherine sarcastically, starting to laugh. "That makes everything as clear as mud. We already know the 'when'. Chip and Jonah were both adopted thirteen years ago."

They weren't going to believe her. Angela already knew it. But she'd come this far. She had to tell them what she knew.

So she described what she had seen on her one day working at Sky Trails. Not everything—she didn't mention the note, and she didn't mention Monique yelling at her. But she described how she'd seen the plane land out of nowhere. Here Katherine interrupted. "Did it disappear, too?"

Angela looked at her, surprised that Katherine had asked that question. "I wasn't planning to get to that part until later, but… yes."

"I saw something like that happen once too," said Katherine. "Not a whole plane appearing and disappearing, but a person. A man."

"So you know what it's like." Angela couldn't believe how good it felt to realize that at least one other person in the world had some idea of what it had been like to see something that was there one moment, then gone. Even if the person was just a middle-school kid.

Angela continued her story, about how the plane had been unauthorized and nobody had known where it had come from, and how she'd heard a baby crying, and gone on board to see thirty-six babies, without a single adult.

"What—babies were flying the plane?" Chip burst out, laughing sarcastically. "You expect me to believe that? 'Goo goo gaa-gaa, air traffic control, this is baby plane one, over.' It sounds like something out of a diaper commercial."

 _Why am I even bothering telling these kids this story?_ Angela wondered. _They already don't believe me, and I haven't even gotten to my theory yet. They_ _definitely_ _won't believe that._

Chip, Katherine, and Jonah all had to put forth their own theories, but eventually they allowed Angela to continue. She explained how the FBI had shown up and the place had turned into a crime scene. She explained how she and the other people there had carried the babies off the plane and lined them up on the floor of the gate area. And finally, she explained how the plane had disappeared, and how she and Monique had been the only ones to see it happen. She told them how James Reardon, the guy from the FBI, had been trying to cover it up, and how she'd tried over and over to get her story heard, but nobody had believed her.

"I get paid for doing nothing," she told them. "Even though I've called many times and said I don't deserve disability pay. So I decided to use the money to do research, to study physics…"

" _Physics_?" Katherine looked astonished.

"Well, yeah…" _Okay, here goes._ Angela took a deep breath and told them what she had seen on the side of the plane—the Tachyon Travel logo. Then she explained about tachyons, trying to keep the explanation simple enough for middle-schoolers to understand. "Tachyons are particles that travel faster than the speed of light."

"I thought nothing could travel faster than light," said Katherine.

"Nobody knows really," said Angela, looking carefully at each face. All three faces were still bordering on skepticism. "At least, nobody knows _yet_ ," she continued. "The theories are that if anything could go faster than light, all sorts of weird things would happen. Time and space would have a different relationship. Aging would be different. And, if a plane could travel that fast, it'd become… a time machine."

Jonah and Katherine's eyes were wide—with what, Angela wasn't sure. Disbelief? Surprise? Uncertainty?

Chip was shaking his head. "Who'd send a bunch of babies in a time machine? What would be the point?"

And now it was time for Angela to share her theory, the one that all her research had led to. She looked around at each of them. Katherine, with her wide, interested eyes and determination to solve the mystery. Chip, who underneath all his scorn and sarcasm seemed like a little boy desperate to know who he really was. And Jonah, who seemed different from the other two somehow, almost as if he was afraid to find anything out.

"I don't think anyone sent a bunch of babies in a time machine," Angela told them. "I think a bunch of adults got into a time machine. I think it was an experiment, one of the first attempts at time travel. They didn't understand all the effects. So they didn't realize what would happen when they arrived in our time."

Katherine was hanging on to every word. "You mean—?" She didn't finish.

"I mean," said Angela, "That Chip and Jonah used to be much older than they are now. I think they were changed by traveling through time. I think they—and all the other babies—came from the future."

Chip, Katherine, and Jonah just stared at her. Angela couldn't tell whether they believed her or not. Probably they were just too stunned to say anything.

"Well," Jonah said finally. "Thanks for meeting with us. Your ideas are very, um, interesting—"

Angela had no idea what he said next, if he said anything next. Because right then, a huge, muscular man slammed into the door right behind Jonah. Angela could do nothing but watch in horror as a different man tackled the large man, and both of them tussled with each other on the floor.

"You can't do this!" Angela heard one of the men—not the muscular one—hiss with fury. "Not here. Not now. Do you want to ruin time completely?"

 _Time._ Had he really just said that? "Ruin time completely"? Was this proof that Angela's theory was right? Or at least, that time travel was real?

The man who'd mentioned time looked up and yelled, "Jonah! Chip! Run!"

Angela glanced around. There was nowhere _to_ run. Except… "The window!" she yelled. She rushed over and tugged the window open. Chip ran over to help, then jumped out the opening. Katherine followed, but Jonah hesitated.

"Jonah, come on!" Katherine screamed from outside.

"Go!" the man yelled.

Jonah was still indecisive. "You go first, Angela," he said.

Angela was still watching the men fighting on the floor. The one who'd mentioned ruining time—who'd been telling Jonah and Chip to run—looked up again. "Angela DuPre! We have wronged you in time! We owe you—"

 _Clunk_. The other man pulled him down again and they resumed fighting.

"Angela?" Jonah held out his hand to help her out the window. It was a kind gesture, and Angela had the feeling that Jonah was a really nice kid. But she didn't want to leave.

"You go on," she told Jonah. "I've been waiting thirteen years for something like this. I'm going to stick around and get some answers."

"But they're dangerous!"

"Probably." Angela pushed Jonah toward the window. "That's why _you_ need to get out of here."

"Go, Jonah! Hurry!" Angela heard the voice of the man again, from somewhere under the conference table. "And, Jonah—" he added. "I saw your note! You have to be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored later! Now get out of here! Go! _Go!_ Now!"

Jonah finally jumped out the window and followed the other two. Angela stayed where she was, unsure of what to do. Should she jump in and help? Should she use her Taser? Who would she want to help, anyway? The man who'd been doing the talking seemed like he was trying to protect the kids from the other guy, but she couldn't be sure…

Suddenly, the man who'd told Jonah to leave stood up. Angela looked around for the other man, certain that he was going to pop up and resume the fight. But he didn't.

Had he been injured too badly? Angela looked under the table, expecting to see the muscular man lying there in pain, or unconscious.

He was nowhere in sight.

"Where did he go?" Angela asked the man who was still there. Now that he was standing still, she could get a good look at him. He was good-looking, with short dark hair and greenish eyes. Angela had never seen him before.

But he knew who she was. He had called her by name.

"Angela, I can't explain anything right now. I can't stay in this room for much longer. But I promise, I'll let you know what's going on. We've ruined your life enough, the least we can do is give you an explanation." He started hurrying around the room, putting everything back to how it had looked before he'd entered. The table, the chairs… He closed the window. He snatched the _Witnesses_ and _Survivors_ lists from the table. Then he glanced out the window. "See those trees? The pine trees over there, at the edge of the parking lot? Meet me over there. As soon as you can."

Then he disappeared.


	5. Chapter 5

Angela blinked.

She looked around—had he just moved really fast?

No. He had vanished, just like the plane.

Angela wasn't sure how long she stood there before her brain kicked into action. He had told her to meet him by the pine trees at the edge of the parking lot. Briskly, purposefully, she left the conference room, left the library building, and headed to the copse of trees he'd pointed out. Finally, she was going to get some answers. The answers she'd been waiting thirteen years for…

Before she reached the trees, she turned and raised her hand in a wave, just in case Chip or Jonah or Katherine were still watching—she wanted them to know she was okay.

And then, before she was able to take a step further, her surroundings disappeared. Everything around her turned black, and she felt like she was falling through the blackness of—

Time? Was she traveling through time?

She wasn't going to turn into a baby when she arrived where she was going, was she?

There were lights up ahead. Before she knew it, the lights were coming closer and closer and…

And suddenly, she was lying on a smooth, flat surface. She struggled to push herself upright.

A hand swam in and out of focus in front of her eyes. She took the hand, and it helped her stand up. Once she was standing, she realized that the hand belonged to the man who she'd been talking to at the library.

He was frowning slightly. "Sorry about that," he said. "I was supposed to be able to meet you over by those trees. Our projections showed that I'd be able to get in. But I guess the projections were wrong."

Angela had no idea what he was talking about.

"Fortunately, I was still able to pull you out of time so you could come and meet me here," the man added.

Angela's head was spinning—whether from the travel or from what he had just said, she wasn't sure. "Pull me out of time?"

The man nodded. "Come sit down. I have a lot to tell you."

Angela followed the man over to a pair of odd-looking chairs. Now that her vision had adjusted, she could see her surroundings. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all a bland shade of—well, no color really. They just _were_. The chairs were the only objects in the room. Angela sat down in one and was surprised when it seemed to conform to her body shape in a way that made her feel completely comfortable. Well, physically, anyway.

"Are we in the future?" Angela asked the man, as he sat down in the other chair. "The future, as in, some time ahead of where I come from?"

"Not exactly," the man replied. "We're in what's known as Outer Time. As in, we're not in your time, or any time ahead of your time, or any time before it. Time doesn't exist here. But we can use this place to examine history. The walls and floor turn into—I guess you would think of it as kind of a TV screen?—that lets us look at any time in history that we want. Or, well, almost any time." He frowned again, looking down. Then he looked back at Angela. "But I'm getting ahead of myself. I haven't even told you who I am." He held out his hand for Angela to shake. "My name is Alonzo Alfred Alyssius T'Kah. I'm a time agent. That's someone who—well, in your time period, you'd probably think of a time agent as analogous to a police officer. Someone who enforces the laws of time travel. That's not really the most accurate way to describe my job, but that's essentially what I do."

"So the plane did have something to do with time travel!" Angela could barely contain the excitement in her voice. "That was what I thought—that was the theory I came up with—but nobody would back me up…"

The man was nodding. What had he said his name was? Alonzo Alfred something? Names in the future must be very weird. Angela would just think of him as the time traveler.

"Your theory was a good one," the time traveler said. "It made sense, and was remarkably accurate considering that the best researchers in your time period haven't even come close to figuring out time travel. But it wasn't exactly what happened." He sighed. "I think the best way to explain it is to show you a commercial created by the people responsible for the plane landing at the airport and ruining your life."

"Ruining my life? What are you talking about?"

The time traveler looked pained. "We'll get to that part. Let me show you the propaganda first. That will make it easier for me to explain everything else."

He took something shiny and silver out of his pocket and pushed a button on it. Apparently it was some futuristic version of a remote control, because the wall in front of them suddenly turned into what looked like a completely clear window. Behind the "window" were hundreds and thousands of faces, changing every half second or so like a slideshow.

This was beyond any TV screen Angela had ever seen.

"So you're from the future, obviously," she stated. "How far into the future? What year are you from? What year was the plane from?"

The time traveler clicked another button on his device and the images stopped moving. "I can't tell you that," he said, seeming genuinely apologetic. "You've been contaminated enough. I really shouldn't even be showing you any of this, or telling you anything about time travel, but, well, you already know, and I think you deserve an explanation…"

He clicked his device again and the images started moving once more. A deep male voice started narrating, "From the time humankind achieved time travel, people have been stirred with compassion for the sufferings of the past."

Suddenly, the screen was filled with hundreds of the most violent video clips— _were_ they video clips? They looked so real!—that Angela had ever seen. Men, women, children, and infants, of all different times and places, were brutally killed, executed, and murdered right before Angela's eyes. She suddenly wished the "TV screen" looked a little less realistic.

Eventually, the violent images stopped to reveal a red-haired man sitting in some sort of studio. At the bottom of the screen were the words CURTIS RATHBONE, CEO, INTERCHRONOLOGICAL RESCUE.

Curtis Rathbone was staring out from the screen with a grim expression on his face. "The past was a very brutal place," he said. "But as much as modern humanity's hearts went out to their ancestors, their antecedents, they knew that the paradox and the ripple would make intervention very difficult."

The time traveler paused the video. "Do you know what he means by _paradox_ and _ripple_?"

"A paradox would be, like, making time contradict itself, right?" said Angela. "Like, if I went back in time, and maybe made it so my parents never met each other or died before I was born or something? Because my interference would make it so that I was never born, but then I couldn't have gone back in time and caused that interference, so…"

"Exactly." The time traveler was nodding approvingly. "And how about a ripple?"

Angela thought about what the word _ripple_ could mean, in a time travel sense. "Would that be, maybe, how just one little thing you do in the past could change a whole bunch of things in the future? So, if I went back in time and, I don't know, planted a tree or something, then that would change history because the tree would grow, and then someone would cut it down, and then they'd use the wood to build a house, and someone would move into that house instead of wherever they were originally going to move…" It was a poor example, but the time traveler was nodding once again, looking impressed.

"You have a remarkable understanding of time-travel concepts," he told her. "Yes. That's what he meant by _ripple._ I just wanted to make sure you understood those terms."

He started up the video again and they continued watching.

"We here at Interchronological Rescue were determined to take action," Curtis Rathbone continued. "We studied time very carefully, centuries worth of wars and genocide, famines and pestilence—all the very worst of human suffering. And we discovered hundreds whose deaths were so horrendous, so chaotic, so terrible, we knew we had to save them. And we knew we _could_.

"That's right," he continued. "Rescue was possible. Oh, we knew we couldn't save everyone. Much as we would have liked to, say, save every victim of the twentieth-century European Holocaust, we knew that was off-limits. The ripple would have been extreme—too much has happened as a result of the Holocaust. But to save even the small, insignificant victims of the past—the 'orphans of history,' as it were—didn't our own humanity demand that we try?" He dabbed away a tear at the corner of his eye. "We began ten years ago, rescuing children of the Spanish Inquisition. Babies left in houses that were then burned to the ground, children left for dead who were easily revived by our modern techniques—we could save them! Save them without causing a ripple or a paradox, because they had as good as vanished from history, even without our intervention. And, thus, we could transform those dark days of humanity into a triumph of the human spirit, of modern humanitarianism."

Rathbone continued to explain how people from his era were eager to adopt poor, wronged children from the past, and how "modern"—futuristic, from Angela's perspective—technologies had been able not only to fix physical and psychological issues these children had, but even to reverse aging so that the children could be adopted as completely new people, with no memory whatsoever of the tribulations they'd faced. The commercial ended with footage of a smiling couple beaming down at a gurgling baby in the mother's arms.

"So," said the time traveler, pressing a button on his device and making the image disappear. "Now you know about Interchronological Rescue. And despite how good they try to make themselves seem in their _propaganda_ video—" He glared at where the screen had been—"Don't believe for a moment that their motives are humanitarian and pure."


	6. Chapter 6

"The plane full of babies that appeared that night was Interchronological Rescue's largest attempt at kidnapping children from the past to sell them in the future," the time traveler continued. "As the commercial explained, they had done it before—taking a few children here and there, children who were about to die anyway, and wouldn't be missed. It was questionable at the time, because they were intentionally tampering with time, and it eventually led to the time agency—which I work for—imposing laws prohibiting people bringing anyone from the past into our time period. But this—" He shook his head in disgust. "They started getting worse and worse. It wasn't enough, suddenly, to take just anyone from the past. They wanted famous people, so they could sell them for more money in the future. The problem was that the more famous the people were, the more of an impact the disappearances had on history. For instance, they would take a famous painter before he had the chance to paint the piece of art that made him famous. Thus creating a paradox."

Angela nodded. "So, the babies on the plane were…"

"Some of them were the children of famous people in the past. Albert Einstein, Henry Hudson… Others are famous for things they did on their own. The particular Interchronological Rescue employees who were collecting them…" The time traveler shook his head in revulsion. "Mikhail Hodge and his sidekick, Gary Payne. _So_ lazy and sloppy and careless and…"

The time traveler kept listing off adjectives to describe the two employees, but Angela blanked out for a moment. _Mikhail Hodge and Gary Payne. Hodge. And Gary. The men mentioned in the letter!_ _The ones I'm supposed to get the letter writer away from…_

Were Hodge and Gary going to try to kidnap the letter writer, and sell him or her in the future?

Was this time traveler the letter writer?

Angela forced herself to focus on what the time traveler was saying, rather than her racing thoughts.

"Anyway, these two incompetent idiots are not your average Interchronological Rescue employees—they're much worse. They decided they wanted to be the heroes of Interchronological Rescue. Go above and beyond what anyone had accomplished before. And they wanted to get rich. That was essentially all they cared about. First they tried kidnapping famous adults, such as Amelia Earhart."

"Amelia Earhart?" Amelia Earhart had been one of Angela's childhood heroes. Not quite to the same extent as Bessie Coleman, but still one of her favorites. "That's what happened to her? She was kidnapped by time travelers?" Angela almost laughed. People had been speculating for decades about what had happened to Amelia Earhart. Now Angela had the answer—not like anyone would ever believe her.

"Yes," the time traveler said grimly. "Unfortunately, Hodge and Payne found that the age-reversal techniques that work perfectly on children _don't_ work on adults. Adults' brains are too established. Children can be un-aged to babies and grow up again without a problem—their brains are malleable, adaptable. Amelia Earhart was too old. Her brain—and the brains of the other ten or so adults they kidnapped—turned to mush. Complete brain damage. Irreversible."

Angela didn't feel like laughing anymore. She stared at the time traveler in horror.

"And not only do Hodge and Payne not care about inflicting permanent brain damage," the time traveler continued, "They also don't care how many ripples and paradoxes they cause, as long as they get rich. The thirty-six children on the plane—that was an incredible abomination of time. If we hadn't discovered how to hold back the ripple temporarily, their blunders would have ruined time forever. Everything would have come to an end. All those holes in history where they took the children, and the fact that they completely ruined the beginning of the twenty-first century. None of those kids were ever supposed to end up in that time period. It was the largest group of children that anyone had ever attempted to steal. And Hodge and Payne were so lazy that they didn't even take each child separately. Instead they packed them all into one large—well, I'll call it an airplane, since that's what you saw it as."

Angela wanted to ask what it really was, if it wasn't an airplane. But then she thought of a more important question.

"Wait. I thought Gary and Hodge were from the future—like, your time period, not my time period. Why did they send the babies to 1999?"

The time traveler sighed. "They didn't mean to. They meant for the plane to keep going, all the way until the year—well, all the way until the year Gary and Hodge are from, the year I'm from. The time agency would have been able to stop them completely if we'd had more advance notice. But unfortunately, we weren't even aware of what Gary and Hodge were doing until it was almost too late. They'd already gotten all the children they wanted, and were in the process of transporting the entire plane back to Interchronological Rescue headquarters. We staged an attack and attempted to take control of the plane and arrest Gary and Hodge. But rather than following our instructions and landing safely at the nearest time hollow, they chose to desert the plane, leaving it entirely unmanned, which resulted in it crash landing in a time period it was never supposed to end up in. Which was your time period."

Finally. Finally Angela had an answer, an explanation that made clear everything she'd been wondering about and obsessing over for the last thirteen years. She'd been right. The babies _had_ been important. And her theory had been close—she'd even been right about the babies originally being older, although they hadn't been adults. And they hadn't gotten in the time machine of their own free will. But it was such a relief to finally know what had happened. _See? See? I'm not crazy. It wasn't a waste to put all that time and effort and money into studying physics. I was right! Sort of._

But wait—there was something that didn't really make sense about what the time traveler had just told her.

"Why didn't you go back right away and get all the babies, right after the plane had landed? If you thought it would ruin time for them to stay… maybe you couldn't have prevented me from seeing the plane when it landed, but you could have come and taken it back before I went on and saw all the babies."

"No." The time traveler shook his head. "The moment you saw that plane, we couldn't go back. Time set up a temporary barrier that prevented us from going in and doing anything about it. And the moment you stepped on and saw the babies, the barrier became permanent. We call it Damaged Time. It's time's way of protecting itself, when there have been too many changes, from any more changes. During Damaged Time, no time travelers are able to get in or out. In this particular instance, the damage was so bad that we were only able to _see_ limited moments in time. Watch." The time traveler pushed a button on the device he was holding.

Instantly, the entire floor turned into what looked like a giant timeline. But it wasn't a flat, two-dimensional timeline like Angela remembered drawing for history classes in school. This timeline was multi-dimensional and constantly changing, and Angela felt like if she stood up from her chair, she would fall down thousands of feet and land somewhere on it.

If Angela had to name a specific color for the timeline, she would probably call it light blue. But interspersed along the line were several splashes of yellow, some longer than others, and a few blotches of red. Wherever there was a yellow splash, yellow lines rippled out forward on the timeline, some rippling outward as well.

"Blue is original, untouched time," The time traveler told her. "Time that no time travelers have ever messed with. Yellow is time that time travelers have messed with—those lines flowing forward and outward are the ripples from those time travelers' actions. As you can see—" Angela wasn't sure what the time traveler did, but suddenly they were zooming in on one of the yellow ripples. "As you can see, we set up a barrier at a point along this ripple to hold back the effects of Hodge and Gary kidnapping Edward and Richard, fifteenth-century princes of England, two whole years before they were supposed to die. But it won't last much longer." He sighed.

Angela saw the little barrier he was pointing out at the end of the yellow ripple. Was it just her imagination, or was the barrier quivering ever so slightly, as if about to break?

The time traveler zoomed back out, showing the complete timeline once more. "Then there's red," he told her. "Red is Damaged Time. Sometimes it's a microscopic speck in the grand scope of things—only a minute or an hour or two. Other times it lasts for months." He scowled. "Or, in this case, years."

He started looking up and down the timeline, searching for something. "What I wanted to show you was—oh, I don't feel like searching manually. Voice commands. Show me 1999 through 2012, timeline view."

Immediately, the timeline zoomed in to a small section which, this close up, looked more like a graph than a line. Angela could see each year listed horizontally, and a bunch of numbers—coordinates of some sort?—listed vertically.

Then she noticed the color of this section. It started off light blue, interspersed with minor splashes of yellow. Then, toward the very end of 1999, it had a small splash of yellow, which turned into a small splash of red, which turned into a huge wall of black.

The black continued until midway through 2004, where Angela started seeing tiny flecks of red. The black interspersed with red continued until about halfway through 2012, where it became solid red, surrounded by the biggest collection of yellow ripples Angela had yet seen.

"So the red is Damaged Time, and the yellow is the ripple," she said, because she understood that much. "But what's the black?"

"Show me the time crash on December 18, 1999. Live view," the time traveler said to the timeline.

The timeline started zooming in toward the tiny yellow section between the red and the blue. Then the image switched, and it was like Angela was suddenly looking down at a city, which zoomed in even more to become the airport, which zoomed in even more to become the runway leading up to gate 2B.

"You're probably more accustomed to seeing it from a side angle, not sky view," the time traveler muttered, fiddling with his silver device. The image suddenly vanished from the floor and reappeared on the wall in front of them, where the Interchonological Rescue commercial had been shown. Now it was as if Angela and the time traveler were sitting in their chairs on the runway, waiting for the plane to appear.

And then it did appear, just as Angela remembered. It still took her breath away, seeing it just pop into existence like that. The screen showed Angela telling Monique about it, Monique yelling at Angela and a bunch of other people, Angela stepping onto the plane and seeing all the babies. It showed the FBI arriving, and everyone carrying the babies off the plane.

Then the screen went black.


	7. Chapter 7

_Technology error?_ Angela wondered.

But no—words were appearing. DAMAGED TIME, the screen read. I AM NOT ABLE TO DISPLAY ANYTHING THAT HAPPENED UNTIL JUNE 24, 2004.

"From 2004 until mid-2012, we could only see random pieces of time—sometimes related to you or the kids from the past, sometimes not. The black on the timeline was the portions of time that were so damaged we couldn't see them at all," The time traveler explained. He pushed another button on his device and a stream of random images flashed in front of Angela's eyes, showing too many people to count.

"Oh, wait!" Angela exclaimed suddenly, catching a glimpse of someone. "Was that Jonah?"

"This one?" The time traveler paused the stream of images—or maybe it had just been on fast forward, and he had pressed the equivalent of the Play button. It showed Jonah, the kid from the library, at what looked like a birthday party. He was only a few years younger than when Angela had met him—maybe nine or ten. He was holding a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and as Angela watched, he chugged the entire thing.

"So you could only see certain moments in time, and you couldn't get in at all?" Angela asked.

"We couldn't get in until just recently—just recently in your time, I mean. The first day we were able to get in was a couple weeks before you met Jonah and Chip at the library. Jonah and his family went to meet with an FBI agent to try to find out more about Jonah's adoption. This was the first event since the time crash that had such a strong connection to the time crash—Jonah, curious about his adoption and identity, and James Reardon, the FBI agent who'd come to the scene of the crash that night, both in the same building where Mr. Reardon had first heard about the plane. Having so many people involved with the time crash in that particular place at the same time created enough of a doorway that I could get in. Even so, I was only able to get in at a couple points of damage—places where the pain of the damage was most intense. I could get into the bathroom because that's where Mr. Reardon was when he heard about the plane, and next to his desk because that's where his boss was when he heard the plane had disappeared."

The time traveler called up another scene on the wall. It showed Jonah, Katherine, and two people who Angela assumed were their parents walking into the FBI building. Then the scene switched and showed the time traveler standing in a bathroom, presumably in the same building, bribing a janitor to give Jonah a Mountain Dew. The camera followed the janitor out of the bathroom and showed him giving the drink to Jonah. Then Angela watched as Jonah drank the Mountain Dew, went into James Reardon's office with his family, got sick, and ran to the bathroom. In the bathroom, he met the time traveler, who told him to look at the folder on the desk when he got back.

Next, the screen showed the time traveler appearing out of nowhere in the office and placing a folder on the desk. By this time, Katherine was the only other person in the room, and she turned pale when she saw him appear and disappear.

"She told me about that," Angela remembered. "She said she once saw a person appear and disappear."

"Yes." The time traveler paused the video. "Normally that's a violation of the time code, letting a time native see you appear or disappear. But I needed to place those papers there, and having Katherine see me really wasn't too bad because she and Jonah and Chip had already figured out there was something weird going on. And it helped increase the damage, which in the long run would give us more of an opportunity to get in."

"Why did you put the folder there?"

"That was also to increase the damage. To make a bigger opening so we'd be able to get in again. I didn't expect Jonah and Katherine to take pictures of the files and call all the phone numbers and meet up with you, but…" He shrugged. "I guess it worked out even better that way. We sent notes to all the missing kids too, to get them interested in their adoptions, to get them thinking, which would hopefully allow spots to open up in the time stream for us to get in. We typed the letters in the 1990s—before the time crash—and routed them through mailrooms of giant corporations. This way, the machines would be able to automatically stuff the plain white envelopes and send them off at the right time. Of course, the computers we used _did_ cut off parts of the letters, so we had to resort to some other methods for some of the notes…and as it turned out, Gary and Hodge had the same idea we did. They sent a note to each of the kids too. We were racing each other, so we both ended up making lots of mistakes… like how my colleagues and I actually used property records from the future to compile that _Survivors_ list. And some of the families hadn't even moved to those addresses yet, since a lot of the moves were arranged by Gary and Hodge… it was a mess. We had to work so quickly. Gary and Hodge broke every single rule regarding time travel."

Angela was thinking hard. "Was that one of them, then? The man you attacked at the library?"

"That was Gary," muttered the time traveler. "He's the brawn of their operation; Hodge is the brain. I was trying to subdue Gary so I could send him to time prison, but he managed to get away. But the reason he was able to get in in the first place—and why I was able to get in—was because you had way too many people and objects connected with the time crash in that little room. You, Jonah, Chip, and the _Witnesses_ and _Survivors_ lists. That created a huge doorway to allow time travelers in. But then you all scattered—which I wanted you to do, because I didn't want Gary to get Jonah or Chip—and I only had a little bit of time left in which I could occupy that room. I was going to meet you at the trees and talk—the projectionists at the time agency said there was a high likelihood that I'd be able to—but it turned out not to be possible. So I brought you here instead."

Angela nodded, still processing all the information. She didn't want to forget even the slightest detail of what the time traveler was telling her. This was what her life had led up to for the past thirteen years.

 _So wait. What in the world am I supposed to do with my life now that I actually_ _know_ _what happened with the plane and the babies?_

Angela didn't want to think about that right now. And she realized that, even though she now knew the truth about what had happened, the story of the babies on the plane wasn't over. And something about what the time traveler had just told her didn't make sense. "So…" she said, still trying to work everything out in her mind. "I know you don't want Gary and Hodge to get the kids. But you also said you were trying to increase the points of damage—why? Wouldn't that just make it easier for Gary and Hodge to get them?"

"It would," agreed the time traveler. "And it does. But we don't have much of a choice. We're increasing the points of damage in hopes that we will be able to reach the kids before Gary and Hodge do."

"But why? What are you going to do with them?"

"We're going to return them to their rightful place in history."


	8. Chapter 8

Angela recoiled. _"What?"_

The time traveler sighed. "Remember how I told you that Hodge and Gary completely messed up time by taking those children out of history, and by crashing them in your time period? We need to fix all the problems they created."

"But what about their lives now, in the twenty-first century? They've all been adopted, right? By regular families, and they've grown up having normal lives…"

"They were never supposed to _be_ in the twenty-first century in the first place!" The time traveler retorted angrily. Then his expression softened. "I know. I don't like it either. It's not fair to any of the kids, or to the families who adopted them, or to anyone else. But we _have_ to put them back, or all of time will collapse. Everyone and everything will die." He looked away, then back at Angela. His green eyes appeared both urgent and sorrowful at the same time. "I want to apologize again for how the time crash ruined your life," he said quietly.

"You said that before," Angela hesitated. She wanted to ask more about the kids, to find out whether there was even the slightest chance that the time traveler could do _something_ to allow them to stay in the twenty-first century without making time collapse. But she was suddenly afraid that if they kept talking about the problem, the time traveler would want to jump into action and do something about it immediately. "What exactly do you mean by that?" she asked instead. "How did the time crash ruin my life?"

"Think about it," said the time traveler. "You spent the last thirteen years of your life trying to find proof for your theory about time travel. None of that was supposed to happen. You were supposed to marry a plumber and have five kids."

Angela stared at him, then let out a disbelieving laugh. He had to be joking. "Me? Married with five kids? Uh-uh. That's not going to happen."

"Maybe not _now_. But it was supposed to, in original time. This is what I've been telling you." He glanced down at the device in his hand. "Yes. It's right here. Marcus Smith. You were supposed to meet him on September 14, 2006, when he came to install a new sink in your house. The two of you were supposed to start dating a few months later, and he was supposed to propose to you at midnight on New Year's Day, 2011. The two of you were going to get married on December 20, 2012."

" _This_ year?" Angela shook her head. "No way. You must have me mixed up with someone else."

"As I said, that's what was _supposed_ to happen. Obviously, it didn't. Which means that even if you were to meet Marcus and fall in love with him now, you probably wouldn't be ready to marry him just two months later. Which would throw off the timing of everything, and then you probably wouldn't end up having the five kids you were supposed to have…it's the ripple effect we were talking about earlier. That's five whole kids who will probably never exist, all because of Hodge and Gary. Not to mention the fact that some of the families who adopted kids from the time crash were supposed to adopt other kids instead, and some of them weren't supposed to adopt any kids, and most of the families who moved weren't supposed to move… I have no idea how we're going to fix the mess of your time period, Angela. We've never faced anything this catastrophic. But I do know that we _have_ to return the thirty-six kids to the time periods they belong in. That's the first step toward making sure time doesn't collapse."

Angela's mind was spinning as she tried to think of another way—any other way—to solve the problem. Angela didn't know any of the kids personally except Jonah and Chip, but she knew none of them would want to go back in time and become a different person, leaving their twenty-first century families and lives behind forever.

"Okay," she said finally. "I get that you couldn't get in after the time crash because of Damaged Time. But why didn't you go back and stop Gary and Hodge before they even took the kids from history?"

"That wouldn't have worked," said the time traveler. "As time agents, we do a lot of traveling through time, usually to chase down time criminals like Gary and Hodge, or people who are trying to steal other things from the past—inventions or artwork, for example. A lot of us had already been in some of those time periods, so attempting to go there would have violated the paradox of doubles. Nobody can be duplicated in time—you can't go back to any time period you've already lived through. And in addition to that, whenever there are a lot of changes to time, a lot of time travelers going in and out—especially people like Gary and Hodge, who don't bother to follow the rules and safety procedures—it increases the possibility of creating Damaged Time. None of us wanted to end up stuck in a foreign time period."

The time traveler glanced down at his device again. Angela had thought it was a remote at first, but now it seemed more like a futuristic version of a cell phone. "And speaking of Damaged Time, it looks like the Damaged Time from the time crash officially ends on October… oh _no!"_ The time traveler's face was draining of color, and he was staring, horrified, at his device.

"What? What's wrong?"

"I see what Hodge did." The time traveler sounded as dismayed as he looked. "I see what he's doing. I knew he was up to something, making all those families move… Look."

A new image showed up on the wall: a large group of kids gathered in a spacious room with dark walls and a single dim lightbulb. It looked almost like a cave. The kids were sitting on benches, and a man was standing up, looking like he was getting ready to talk to them. As Angela watched, another man came in. The doorway started closing— _Okay, so I guess it's not a cave—_ and one boy started running toward the closing door.

Angela looked closer and gasped. "Is that _Jonah?"_ She glanced around at the other kids. There were a lot of them—maybe close to thirty-six. "Are those all the kids from the plane?"

The time traveler froze the image on the screen and nodded grimly. "Hodge must have set up this cave before Damaged Time started. Maybe years before, back in the early 1990s. And then he hijacked this adoption conference and made all the families move so the kids would come to the same place at the same time…" He pointed at the image, still frozen on the wall. "He just had to trust that everything would stay ready. And it did. Everything worked exactly how he wanted it to. He has them all."


	9. Chapter 9

Angela felt dread course through her body like a shock wave. _He has them all…_ "And he's going to take them all to the future?"

"No," answered the time traveler, standing up. "He will not be taking any of them to the future. Because I'm going to stop him." He looked hesitantly at Angela. "I really should return you to your normal life. But given that your life already isn't the way it's supposed to be, and your five kids will probably never be born anyway, and you already know everything about what's going on… just a moment." He seemed to flicker before Angela's eyes, then continued. "Okay. I've just checked with the time agency, and we all agree that if you want, you can come with me when I go to that time cave. I'll probably need backup, and the projections show that we'll have a better chance of beating Gary and Hodge if I bring you with me than if I bring another time agent." He gave Angela a probing look. "This is only if you want to come. Otherwise, I can return you to your normal life."

Angela didn't even have to think about the decision. It was a no-brainer. "I'm coming with you."

The time traveler nodded. "Then here's how it's going to work. I'm going to go in and tackle Gary. We're going to place you at the back of the cave, and I want you to stay hidden until I signal for you. This could be dangerous." He fixed her with a steely glance.

"I've spent the last thirteen years waiting for something to come of my theory," Angela told him. "This is what my life is all about. I'm willing to risk it." She suddenly remembered the Taser in her purse. "I don't know if this will really help, but I have a Taser with me."

"You do?" The time traveler looked surprised. "I think that will be very helpful, actually. A regular twenty-first century weapon, capable of incapacitating but not killing… can I see it?"

Angela took the Taser out of her purse and handed it to the time traveler.

"This is perfect," he said. "So we'll have you in the back of the cave with the Taser, but you'll stay hidden unless I signal for you to come out. It'll be something subtle—maybe I'll just look over toward your section of the cave, or something like that."

"Okay."

"Let's see… you're fine in what you're wearing, but I'm going to change my clothes, just in case something goes wrong…" Again, the time traveler seemed to flicker before Angela's eyes, and when he reappeared, he was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and hiking boots rather than the nondescript clothing he had been wearing before.

"How did you—?"

"Here," The time traveler handed Angela some rolled-up ropes. "Keep these in the back of the cave with you; we might need them." His gaze flicked to his device again, and he nodded. "All right. I think we have everything we'll need. Due to the nature of this particular time mission, it would be too risky to bring an Elucidator with us, so—"

The time traveler continued talking, but Angela was no longer listening. _Elucidator? Did he just say_ _Elucidator_ _?_

"What's an Elucidator?" she interrupted.

"This," The time traveler held up the device he'd been using, the one Angela had figured was some sort of futuristic remote or cell phone. "It's what we use to travel through time. Usually we time agents bring Elucidators with us when we travel to the past, but it's too dangerous to bring one in when we're so close to such a large period of Damaged Time… especially because Gary and Hodge probably already brought one." He scowled. "That's the first step of the plan. When I tackle Gary, I'll try to grab his Elucidator, and then I'll use it to send him and Hodge to time prison. After they're safely out of the picture, I'll be able to send all the kids where they're supposed to be."

Angela's heart sank at these words. So that was still the plan, apparently. Sending all the kids back to the past, taking them away from the lives and families they'd always known. The time traveler had said that this was the only way to save time from collapsing, but still… "Are you _sure_ there isn't some other solution?" she asked. "One where we don't have to send all the kids back in time?"

"I wish there were," said the time traveler, and Angela could tell he was sincere. "But the time agency has gone through all the options. All of our top projectionists have run countless projections… this is the only way to save time." He pressed a button on the Elucidator and it disappeared. "I just sent it back to time agency headquarters," he answered, in response to Angela's puzzled expression. "The time agency will handle sending us to the cave." He paused. "Are you sure you want to help me with this?"

She didn't want to help him with sending the kids back in time. But she knew it was important to get them away from Gary and Hodge. And maybe, once they got rid of Gary and Hodge, she could reason with the time traveler, try to come up with other solutions. Maybe they could even involve the kids in a brainstorming session. Regardless, she wasn't about to be left behind.

"Of course," she told him.

"Are you ready to go now?"

Angela nodded.

"Okay. Remember, you'll be in the back of the cave, with the Taser and the ropes, and you'll only come out if I signal you."

Angela nodded again.

"We're ready," the time traveler said, only he didn't seem to be talking to Angela this time.

A moment later, everything went black. Angela felt herself once again whizzing through time.


	10. Chapter 10

Angela felt a little disoriented in the moments right after she landed. At first, she could barely move. Her vision and hearing also seemed distorted. It took her a minute to realize that she was now in the cave she'd seen projected onto the wall. And it _was_ a cave. She could tell now.

She was hidden in the shadows toward the back wall, just as the time traveler had told her she'd be. Once she felt stable enough, she stood up and peeked out into the brighter part of the cave. She could see most of the kids still sitting on the benches. Jonah and Katherine were both up toward the front of the cave, along with the muscly man the time traveler had said was Gary. As Angela watched, the time traveler appeared right behind Gary and pummeled him to the floor. Now Gary and the time traveler were wrestling around on the ground just like they had at the library.

"JB! You came back!" Katherine shrieked.

 _What?_ Had Katherine just called the time traveler _JB?_ But that wasn't his name! Those weren't even his initials. Maybe Angela had heard her wrong.

But then Jonah yelled, "Katherine! JB's going to lose if we don't help him!" Jonah and Katherine went to help the time traveler—JB?—and Jonah yelled for Chip to come over as well. Chip rushed over to join them, followed by some of the other kids.

 _Bang!_ A loud sound went off like a gunshot. Angela looked toward the source of the noise. The other man—Hodge, it must be—was holding something small and silver in the air, and the kids had all frozen in shock, staring at him.

"You weren't supposed to bring that into the twenty-first century. You know that's illegal," JB said calmly.

Hodge shrugged. "Desperate times call for desperate measures. Surely you've heard that one before."

"These are only desperate times because of you," said JB.

Hodge stepped a little bit closer to JB and pointed the silvery object—which was undoubtedly his Elucidator—at him. " _I_ didn't choose the century. Children, get away from the interloper. This doesn't concern you."

JB reached out and grabbed one of the girls. "Oh, you wouldn't hurt one of _them_ ," he sneered at Hodge. "It might cut into your profits. What are you getting per kid—a million? Two?"

"That one's only a minor Chinese princess from the fourth century. Very obscure. Who says I wouldn't sacrifice her to keep the others?"

 _Yikes,_ thought Angela. _This Hodge guy seems_ _dangerous_. Judging by the threatening way he was still pointing the Elucidator at JB, and what Angela had already learned about him, he probably really would be willing to kill to get what he wanted.

Angela clutched the Taser and readied her finger on the trigger. Any moment now, JB would probably give her the cue.

"Um, hello?" said the girl JB was holding onto. "This is seeming a little too realistic. I want to stop now."

JB set her aside, and Jonah stepped between JB and Hodge. "You can't shoot him!" Jonah yelled at Hodge.

Hodge started laughing. "Amazing. And you are…" He squinted toward Jonah's shirt. Maybe Jonah was wearing a nametag? "Jonah Skidmore? So you're really…" He looked at his Elucidator. "Well, that's very interesting."

"What?" asked Jonah.

Hodge didn't answer. "I can't believe they think you're on their side," he said to JB. "You must not have told them what you want to do."

Angela couldn't see exactly, but she thought JB might have rolled his eyes. "Oh, and you did?" he asked Hodge.

Hodge shrugged. "I'm not the one pretending to have ethics. _And_ I'm taking them to a better place. A better time."

"If the future's still there after we release the ripple," said JB.

Now Hodge looked like he was rolling his eyes. "Oh, that's right, I forgot. _You're_ allowed to play with time, even if no one else is."

"We have to protect it. You wounded it so badly, we can't follow any of the old rules anymore," JB retorted. Then he very deliberately looked into the shadowy darkness of the cave, where Angela was standing.

This was her cue.

Angela stepped out into the lit portion of the cave, aimed her Taser at Hodge, and pulled the trigger. As soon as Hodge was down, she re-loaded the Taser and shot at Gary. He crumpled to the ground as well.

Jonah was staring at her in what looked like mixed shock and awe. "Is that a ray gun?" he asked.

"Nope," said Angela. As she explained the Taser to Jonah, she watched JB out of the corner of her eye. He was busy tying Hodge's wrists and ankles together with some sort of silvery string.

"Quick, Angela, get the ropes," he instructed her as he did the same to Gary. "So we can tie them up firmly."

Angela hurried back toward the shadowy section of the cave to retrieve the ropes. _Where did they go?_ Her eyes had gotten adjusted to the light in the brighter section of the cave, so it was difficult to see where she had placed the ropes in the shadowy section.

 _Come on, come on… they've got to be around here somewhere…_

She was still looking for the ropes, not paying attention to what was going on behind her, when she heard JB's sudden yell. "Angela! The Taser!"

Angela whirled around to see Jonah throwing the Elucidator up in the air—how had he even gotten it in the first place?—and Katherine catching it. Then Jonah started running full out toward the back of the cave, right toward Angela.

Angela glanced at JB, wondering if he still wanted her to retrieve the ropes. But JB wasn't paying attention. Thinking quickly, Angela re-loaded her Taser and pointed it toward Gary and Hodge. They were still lying on the floor, but they'd probably be getting up soon, and if she wasn't going to be able to find the ropes in enough time, another shot from the Taser might be necessary.

Just as she was taking aim, she heard JB yelling from across the cave. "Shoot Jonah!"

Angela changed her aim until she was pointing directly at Jonah. But she wasn't about to shoot him with the Taser. None of this was Jonah's fault. Jonah was just an innocent kid who'd happened to be kidnapped from the past and adopted by a family in the twenty-first century. She didn't want Gary and Hodge to take him to the future, but she didn't want to make it easier for JB to take him back to the past either. Time had survived for thirteen years with Jonah and the other kids in this time period—surely it could survive a little longer. However long it took them to come up with a better solution.

In a split second, Angela made her decision. She stepped closer to Jonah, but she didn't use the Taser on him. Instead, she glanced over in JB's direction. It was dark enough where she was. If she adjusted her position ever so slightly, he wouldn't be able to see what she was doing…

Angela turned the Taser sideways and slipped it into Jonah's grasp.


	11. Chapter 11

Jonah looked astonished. Angela didn't blame him. "What?" he exclaimed.

Angela hurriedly put a finger to her lips, signaling him to be quiet. If he blew her cover, everything would be ruined. JB would probably send her back to her old life, or maybe that Outer Time place, and she wouldn't be able to help any of the kids.

"No!" she screamed. "You can't have it!"

Jonah was still staring at her. She stepped closer to him, her foot landing on something— _Oh, there are the ropes—_ and whispered, "I really am on your side. Completely. You deserve to know the truth. So pretend that you captured me."

Angela was pretty sure that JB and the others couldn't see what was going on. But even so, it looked like Jonah needed a little extra prompting. "Maybe you should shout something about getting the ropes?" she suggested, bending down to retrieve them.

"Move it!" Jonah shouted, sounding like an actor in a play. "Get those ropes now!" Once Angela had straightened up with the ropes, he whispered to her, "What's going on? Tell me!"

Angela knew how he felt. But there was no time to explain anything right now. "There isn't time to talk. Besides, you should hear it from the experts, not me. Go on." She nudged him to start moving.

But Jonah started backing away from her, not even bothering to keep up the pretense that he had captured her. Angela hurriedly stepped in front of him and repositioned the Taser—still in Jonah's hand—so that it was pressed up against her ribs. "Don't you dare set that off right now," she whispered. "You're too close. But _please_ make it look like it's possible you captured me."

JB was calling Angela's name from the front of the cave. Angela let go of the Taser and she and Jonah stepped out of the shadows together.

JB looked astounded. "He got your weapon? He overpowered you?"

"He's a very strong young man," Angela told him. "Stronger than he looks."

Suddenly, Jonah pushed the Taser so hard against Angela's ribs that she stumbled forward. "Maybe not quite so realistic," she whispered.

"Give the ropes to Chip," Jonah commanded her.

Chip started objecting that he didn't know how to tie knots, but Jonah handed him the Taser. "Here," he said. "Shoot her if you have to."

What was Jonah playing at? Did he not trust her after all? _Chip_ wouldn't know that Angela had given the Taser to Jonah. He would think that Jonah actually had needed to fight her and overpower her to take possession of it. That meant that if Angela made one wrong move, she'd be lying on the ground as helplessly as Gary and Hodge.

Angela watched as Jonah tied up Gary and Hodge, then moved on to JB, who protested, but didn't resist. Then he moved onto Angela, and tied her up just like he'd tied up the others.

 _And now I've_ _actually_ _been captured,_ she thought grimly. Her plan had backfired. Not like she'd had much of a plan in the first place. But maybe this was good. Maybe JB could explain to Jonah how to send Gary and Hodge to—time prison, had he called it?—and then they could have a rational discussion about what to do next. Since JB was tied up as well, he would have no choice but to sit and listen to all the suggestions. There were thirty-eight people in the cave, not counting Gary and Hodge. Surely with all those brains working together, they would be able to come up with something.

The girl who JB had used as a shield before started sniffling. "Oh, please. Just open the door and let us go home. My cell phone isn't working—I've been trying and trying to call the police—once we're out of the cave, I'm sure it will work right…"

"Sure," said Jonah. "You find a way to open that door, we're all out of here."

"No!" exclaimed JB. "Don't!"

Gary spoke up from his spot on the ground. "Oh, let them try. There's a keypad by the entryway. The code is twenty-one ST."

"What will happen if we try that code?" Jonah asked JB. "If we open the door?"

JB looked hesitant. "You'll see… You'll find out too much, all at once. It might scare you."

 _Wait. Isn't this just a modified cave in the twenty-first century?_ Angela thought. _Isn't it still 2012? They didn't somehow take this whole cave into the future when they closed the door, did they? Is that possible?_

Jonah didn't seem bothered by JB's information. He went over and typed in the code Gary had given him. The door slid open to reveal black nothingness.

The cave was suddenly an echo hall of screams. Thirty-six voices—well, maybe not quite that many, but close enough—were yelling in a cacophony of terror. Jonah shut the door, but even still, several of the kids seemed to be bordering on hysteria. Even Angela wasn't exactly sure what had just happened. _Are we in Outer Time again?_ She wondered. _It kind of looked like it did when I traveled through time. Is this whole cave traveling through time right now? To which time period?_

She glanced at JB, who looked as worried as she felt. She looked over toward Gary and Hodge, who both had slight smiles on their faces. _Are we already on our way to the future?_

"Explain," Jonah ordered, looking at all four of them—JB, Gary, Hodge, and Angela. "Where are we?"

Hodge smirked. "The more appropriate question would be 'When are we?'"

"Don't be cruel," JB kicked at Hodge. "This is bound to be very traumatic for all of them." He looked at Jonah. "We call this a time hollow. When they shut the door, Hodge and Gary pulled this whole cave outside of time."

Angela felt slightly relieved. A time hollow—that didn't sound like they were in the process of traveling through time. That sounded more like the Outer Time place JB had taken her.

"So, what—like, we don't exist right now?" A boy asked. He was wearing a name tag with the name _Alex_ on it.

"No, we exist. But 'now' doesn't," JB explained.

"Why not?" a girl with the name tag _Emily_ asked.

JB looked at Alex and Emily, who seemed perfectly calm, and Jonah, who was still waiting for an explanation. "Get them calmed down," JB said to the three of them, glancing over at the other kids, who were still screaming and crying. "And make them sit on the benches again. Hodge and Gary and I will explain everything."

It took a while for Jonah, Alex, and Emily to calm down all the screaming kids. The whole time, the four adults sat lined up against the side wall of the cave. Angela glanced over at JB, who looked distressed. None of this was going according to the plan he'd made in the Outer Time place. He'd ended up being overpowered, and the kids were taking control.

Angela tried not to smile. That was a good thing, right? Now she just needed to make sure the kids _stayed_ in control.

Eventually, all the kids were more or less calmed down, and Katherine, Chip, and a few of the others came back to get the adults. "We're going to bring all of you to the front of the room, where you'll be able to explain everything," said Chip, pointing the Taser at each adult in turn. "If any of you try anything, I'll Tase you." His voice shook, and Angela wasn't sure whether he would actually have the courage to use the Taser on any of the adults or not. But she wasn't going to take any chances.

JB, Gary, and Hodge were all looking much more warily at Katherine, who was pointing Hodge's Elucidator at them. "Be careful with that," JB warned her. "You don't even know how to operate it. Only trained professionals are supposed to use those." He glared at Gary and Hodge.

"Come on," Some of the other kids stepped forward and started pushing, pulling, and dragging Angela and the others toward the front of the room. It hurt, but Angela didn't complain. Chip and Katherine were still guarding the whole group of them with the Taser and the Elucidator.

When they reached the front of the room, Hodge looked at JB. "Just show them the presentation," he said.

"You mean, your commercial? No way."

"You can give the counterpoint afterward. We promise," Gary assured him.

Angela assumed that the commercial they were talking about must be the same one JB had shown her in Outer Time. "Let them," she advised JB. "You showed it to me." She wasn't sure any of the kids would believe that they were kidnapped children from the past if they were given just an explanation.

"All right," JB sighed.

Hodge instructed Katherine on how to access the video on the Elucidator, and the front wall of the cave turned into a sort of movie screen, like Angela had seen in Outer Time. A collective gasp went up around the room.

And then the commercial started up. The kids reacted with horror at all the violent images toward the beginning, and with shock at Curtis Rathbone's explanation. Then JB ordered for the commercial to be turned off, and Katherine obeyed.

JB, Gary, and Hodge started arguing about Interchronological Rescue. When they brought up the age reversal, Angela felt she had to say something to Jonah, Chip, and Katherine. Earlier that afternoon, she'd been so excited to share her theory—and it had been wrong. "This was one of the few parts of the theory I was right about," she told them. "They had turned you all into babies again, even though some of you had once been much older. Teenagers, even."

Jonah stared at her. Maybe he hadn't yet realized that he and the other kids in the cave were the kids everyone had been talking about. The kids the commercial had been about.

"Us?" he gasped. "You're talking about us?"

Angela nodded, but Jonah was watching JB and Hodge, who had started arguing again. They became louder and louder until they were practically screaming at each other, and Angela's ears were ringing. Finally, Jonah climbed on top of a bench and yelled, "Who are we?"

This stopped them. JB and Hodge both turned in his direction, and JB sighed. "Show them," he said to Hodge. "They're going to have to find out eventually."

Once again, Hodge told Katherine how to access the information on the Elucidator, and a seating chart for the airplane appeared on the front wall. Angela leaned forward in interest. JB hadn't shown her this. She remembered taking careful note of which baby had arrived in which seat, back at the airport, but of course, she hadn't known at that time that the babies were famous children from history. She squinted and tried to make out the names. _Virginia Dare… Anastasia and Alexis Romanov… Charles Lindbergh III…_ the missing Lindbergh baby! So _this_ was what had happened to him? Wait, but hadn't someone ended up finding his body?

 _Maybe I'm supposed to go back in time and change that. When I go to 1932…_

Most of the kids were screaming again. Or at least yelling. But this time it wasn't in terror. This time, most of the voices Angela could hear were yelling things like, "Which one am I?" and "No way!" Hodge was saying something, but Angela couldn't hear him over all the yelling. Then JB started yelling at Hodge again, and his voice clearly carried over all the other noise. "It was your worst rescue mission ever! If we hadn't discovered how to hold back the ripple, just temporarily, just until we can heal all the wounds, until we can return the children to their rightful place in history…"

"What?" Katherine's voice broke out, even louder than JB's. "You want to send everyone back in time?"

Everyone fell silent. Katherine pointed the Elucidator straight at JB. "You can't do that," she said forcefully. "I won't let you."

"I'm sorry. I wish there were some other way," said JB. "It's not fair to any of you. But… some of you are royalty. Or the children of explorers. You can understand the need to sacrifice for your country, to take risks for all humankind. This is even more important. Yes, returning you to history may be dangerous for many of you. Even deadly. But—think of it as your chance to save the world. To give your own life in order to help every other person on the planet, for all time."

Angela looked around at all the children's faces. Understandably, none of them looked too thrilled at the prospect. _We have to find another way. Whatever it takes… we have to find another way._


	12. Chapter 12

Hodge was talking now, but Angela wasn't listening. _What kind of technology do they have in the future, anyway? Do they have really realistic-looking humanoid robots? Maybe they could send one of those back in time, that looks exactly like the kid, and then the kid can stay here…_

But if the people in JB's time had that as a possibility, certainly JB would have already thought of it.

 _Can Elucidators bring people into the future as well as the past? As in, the future even further ahead from the time JB is from? Would it be possible for JB or someone to go into that time period, and talk to people there? Maybe they would have better technology or ideas. Maybe they could help us._

But again. JB had said that the time agency had already looked in to every possibility. Surely Angela wasn't the only person who'd ever thought of going even further into the future to ask for help. Either it wasn't possible, or they'd tried it and it hadn't worked.

Angela tuned back in to the conversation. JB was giving an example to the kids, comparing the time crash to a nuclear explosion. Angela remembered that it wasn't just the past that the time crash had affected. It was the present as well. According to JB, none of the kids from the time crash were supposed to be in the twenty-first century at all.

Even if they did somehow come up with a solution that fixed the past, could the presence of the thirty-six extra kids in Angela's time period still destroy all of time?

She forced herself to focus on what was happening at the current moment. Jonah was asking Hodge to give him the code to go home—home to his ordinary life in October 2012. Hodge refused, so Jonah turned to JB. But JB also refused. "You're going to have to choose," he said slowly. "Your 'now' is off-limits. Which will it be—the future or the past?"

Jonah didn't answer. None of the kids did. They all just kind of sat listlessly, doing nothing. This was good—none of them were fully committing to either decision. Which meant that the kids probably thought the same thing Angela thought—that it was possible to come up with an alternate solution.

The problem was, they weren't _doing_ anything. They were just sitting, doing literally nothing, rather than talking with each other and trying to figure out what to do.

Angela could say something, but that would clue JB in to the fact that she wasn't completely on his side.

Angela glanced toward Jonah, trying to catch his eye. Maybe Jonah could get a conversation going. He seemed like a take-charge kind of kid, and the other kids seemed to look to him as kind of a leader.

It felt like a lifetime, but Jonah finally looked in her direction. Angela knew she had to be subtle to avoid being seen by JB, so she simply raised an eyebrow and mouthed the word _Talk_.

At first, she wasn't sure whether Jonah had understood her or not. But then he stood up and addressed the other kids: "We're facing a very important choice." He hesitated.

 _Go on,_ Angela thought. _Keep talking. Get the other kids involved._

"And yet," Jonah continued, and Angela silently cheered. "We don't know if we can trust the information we've been given. How do we know you're not all working together?" The question was directed toward Angela, JB, Hodge, and Gary. Out of the corner of her eye, Angela saw JB giving Jonah an incredulous look.

"So," Jonah pressed on. "We're going to take each of you to a different corner of the room and talk to you individually."

 _Okay,_ thought Angela. _This could work._ Her group, at least, could collaborate and try to think about what to do. She just hoped Gary and Hodge didn't have any tricks up their sleeves—ways to send kids to the future _without_ using the Elucidator. Because that was possible, wasn't it? JB had remotely zapped her to Outer Time back in the library parking lot, and then the time agency had remotely zapped both of them into the cave.

 _This isn't going to end with Gary and Hodge being sent to time prison_ , she realized suddenly. _It can't. I know they escape. Because it isn't November 21 yet. And on November 21, I'm supposed to go back in time and rescue someone from them._

Although, then again, this was time travel. For Gary and Hodge, Angela rescuing someone from them could have already happened, even though it hadn't happened for Angela yet. So there was still hope.

Chip, Katherine, and some of the other kids came over again and started pulling the adults away from each other, toward separate parts of the cave. Angela ended up in the back left corner, surrounded by Jonah, Katherine, Alex, and Emily.

"Quick," said Jonah, looking around surreptitiously at JB, Hodge, and Gary in their own corners of the cave. "What do you think we should do?"

"I don't know much more about this time-travel stuff than you do," Angela told him apologetically. "I can tell you this—the man you keep calling JB is sincere. That Hodge character doesn't seem very trustworthy."

Katherine frowned. "What's JB's real name?"

"Names in the future are very weird. I can hardly pronounce it," Angela told her. "It's something like Alonzo Alfred Aloysius K'Tah—you might as well keep calling him JB."

Not only that, but it might be important that they keep calling him JB. Could one of them be the note writer?

"How far in the future are we talking about?" asked Emily.

"He won't tell me. He says I've already been contaminated enough." Angela grinned, remembering what was arguably the most ludicrous thing JB had said to her when they were in Outer Time. "He says I was supposed to marry a plumber and have five kids. I told him, 'Uh-uh, I don't think so!' He must have had me mixed up with somebody else."

"Where did you go, that day at the library?" asked Katherine. "Jonah saw you disappear."

Ah, so Jonah had been watching. Angela hadn't seen him, but then, she hadn't exactly had a lot of time to look around. "You mean, earlier this afternoon?" she clarified, just to be sure.

"No, it was, like, three weeks ago."

 _Three_ _weeks_ _ago? What?_ "Get out!" said Angela in disbelief. "This time stuff can really mess with your mind. Honestly, to me it was just like an hour ago. Maybe an hour and a half." Since Jonah was looking at her strangely, she proceeded to describe what it had been like in Outer Time. Not surprisingly, Jonah and the others had a lot of questions about time travel and the things that had happened, and Angela answered them the best she could, recalling what JB had told her about the paradox of doubles, Damaged Time, JB trying to increase the damage so he could get in, and the time agency using future addresses to send notes into the past.

"This was a desperate case," Angela concluded, "Because of Hodge and Gary. JB says they totally mucked up time."

Jonah, Katherine, Alex, and Emily were all quiet for a moment. Then Katherine spoke up, and it sounded like she was trying not to cry. "So even if JB managed to fix all that time in the past—even if he sent all the kids back—how would he fix all the damage _now_? How would he tell my parents they don't have a son anymore?"

"I don't know." Angela remembered JB's concern about the twenty-first century, about how much it had been changed by thirty-six families adopting kids they were never supposed to adopt, and Angela never marrying that plumber and having five kids. "He's really worried about my nonexistent five kids too," she told Katherine and the others. "The way he acts, you'd think one of them was going to be president someday."

 _What if one of them_ _was_ _supposed to be president one day?_ Angela wondered. _What if no matter what we do, we can't fix everything?_


	13. Chapter 13

Angela was jolted out of her thoughts by a sudden yell from Jonah. "Hey! Who untied Gary?"

Angela turned around—at least, she turned around the best she could, since she was still tied up. Gary came bolting into her line of vision, the ropes dragging behind him. "Some kids are smart enough to know that the future's the only choice!" he yelled, grinning maliciously.

The cave was in an uproar again. Angela watched helplessly as Gary slammed into Chip, wrenched the Taser from his hands, and pointed it at Katherine. Katherine screamed in pain and dropped the Elucidator, which was immediately retrieved by Gary. Before anyone had a chance to do anything, Gary had already typed some sort of code into the Elucidator and was smirking at JB. "Too bad, loser," he mocked. "I guess some of us are just better at being persuasive."

"No—you can't—" JB strained at the ropes binding him, but he wasn't able to break free.

"Do the age reversal first," Hodge instructed Gary. "This group will be easier to deal with as babies."

 _Oh no,_ thought Angela. _I can't let that happen!_ As long as the kids were all still thirteen, there was still hope that they could overpower Gary and Hodge and gain back control. But if Gary turned them all into babies…

Angela looked across the room at JB, hoping he would be able to tell her what to do. But he was busy watching Gary and Hodge. _I need to get these ropes off. Then I'll…_ She didn't know what she would do. Tackle Gary? Go untie JB? She wasn't sure she would have time to do anything. But she had to try.

Jonah and Alex were standing up, facing Gary. Katherine and Emily were on the ground near Angela, and it looked like Emily had just finished pulling the Taser barbs out of Katherine. Angela winced. _Sorry, Katherine. I never meant for that Taser to be used on_ _you_ _._

Katherine was now yelling at Gary. All eyes were on her. Angela tried to assess Gary's perspective, then Hodge's. Jonah and Alex were both standing sort of in front of Emily…

Angela nudged Emily with her foot. Emily turned around, still in her sitting position on the ground. Angela motioned with her head for Emily to come closer.

Emily scooched over until she was right next to Angela. "What?"

"I need you to untie me," Angela whispered. "Right now. We can't let Gary and Hodge get away with this."

Emily wasted no time. She immediately started working on the ropes tying Angela's wrists together. "These are tied very tightly," she grimaced. "I think I almost have it, though, if I can just…"

"OW!" A loud male scream echoed around the cave. Both Angela and Emily looked toward the source of it.

It looked like Jonah had decided to make an attempt at taking Gary down. It was Gary who had screamed. But, as Angela watched in horror, Gary gave Jonah a hard shove and Jonah went flying into the wall.

For a moment, everyone in the cave seemed paralyzed with shock. Then Jonah gave a triumphant "Ha!" and Angela realized he was holding the Elucidator.

 _Yes!_ They were saved. As long as Jonah could figure out a way to _keep_ possession of the Elucidator…

But Gary didn't seem even remotely motivated to grab the Elucidator from Jonah. He was smirking once again. "It doesn't matter, kid," he chuckled. "It's already programmed. That's one of the newer models—you don't even have to point it. We just do that out of habit."

"JB! Make it stop!" screamed Jonah, throwing the Elucidator toward JB's corner of the cave.

JB reached up with his roped hands and caught the Elucidator. Then kids from all corners of the cave swarmed over toward him, and he was obscured from Angela's view.

Gary turned to run toward JB as well, but in an instant, he disappeared.

Then Hodge disappeared.

Then Angela felt the ropes loosen, and saw that Emily had managed to untie the knot.

Angela breathed a sigh of relief. They would be okay now. Hopefully, the sudden disappearance of Gary and Hodge meant that JB had sent them both to time prison, and now—once her ankles were untied—Angela could head over in JB's direction and convince him to let the kids have a brainstorming session. She bent over and hastily worked with Emily to untie her ankles.

The two of them had just started over toward the crowd at the other end of the cave when several kids screamed. Then Chip yelled, "No!"

Angela was close enough now to see Chip, and to see that JB was pointing the Elucidator at him. She took another step forward, not really sure what she was intending to do. Everything was happening so fast.

Almost simultaneously, Katherine and Jonah grabbed on to Chip. A split second later, all three of them disappeared.

And a split second after that, five people appeared on the floor right where Jonah, Katherine, and Chip had been.


	14. Chapter 14

Once again, the cave became a cacophony of screams. Angela fought her way forward to the front of the crowd, straining to see who the people on the floor were.

Two of them were Chip and Alex, looking perfectly normal. One was a man Angela didn't recognize, wearing battered, muddy armor. The other two were Jonah and Katherine, but they looked completely different. Whereas one moment ago they had been clean and tidy, wearing ordinary clothes and looking like ordinary kids, now they were wearing armor just like the stranger, and their faces and hair were covered in mud.

"Are you all right?" Angela asked them urgently. What in the world had just happened? Had they just come back from traveling through time? How long had they been away?

"We're fine," Jonah assured her. "We just look awful."

"Speak for yourself," said Katherine. Then she looked down at her muddy hair and her messy, dented armor, and shrugged. "Oh well. Sometimes you can't help getting a little messy."

The man Angela didn't know stood up, and held out his hand toward Angela. "Hadley Correo, ma'am," he introduced himself. "I'm very glad to meet you."

Angela shook his hand, looking up into his face. He had a bushy beard—dark brown streaked with gray—and kind, twinkly eyes. Angela was slightly taken aback by his appearance and his politeness. "You too," she replied, shaking his hand. He had a very firm handshake. "Angela DuPre. I take it you're a friend of JB's?" She assumed that was why he was here, judging by the fact that he'd shown up with the kids, seemed like a nice person, and didn't seem to be trying to grab kids and send them to the future. She realized a moment later that Hadley Correo might not know JB as "JB", and opened her mouth to correct herself. But Jonah was already talking.

"Where's JB? Did everything work out? Chip and Alex are safe, but what happened to history?"

"We have an expression in this business," said a voice behind the pack of kids, who were finally starting to quiet down. Angela looked over and saw that it was JB speaking. It looked like someone had untied him as well. "Time will tell," he continued. "It will take a while to be sure of the outcomes—"

"Oh, come on," Jonah interrupted. "I know how time travel works now. You probably zoomed up to the future before coming back here—you probably already spent years studying how the changes rippled through history!"

 _So they did go back in time. Did all of them go? JB and Chip and Alex included? Why do they not look battered like Jonah, Katherine, and Hadley?_

JB laughed. "It's true that I could have. But I didn't," he said, in answer to Jonah's question. "My first priority was making sure all of you were all right."

Hadley patted Jonah and Katherine on the back. "These kids are troopers. I'd put them up against some of the best time agents I've ever worked with."

JB rolled his eyes good-naturedly. "Thanks a lot! Remind me of that the next time I nearly kill myself getting recertified! I still won't be as good as thirteen-year-old amateurs!"

Hadley laughed, but Katherine was frowning slightly at JB. "Why didn't you tell us somebody else was there on the battlefield to help us?"

 _Battlefield?_ thought Angela. _Did she just say_ _battlefield_ _?_

"All our projections showed that wouldn't work," JB answered. "You had to feel responsible. And…you were. Hadley wouldn't have known to talk about Chip's dad. He wouldn't have known to talk about Katherine's variety of boyfriend choices."

 _Chip's dad? Katherine's variety of boyfriend choices?_ Those must have been references to things that had happened while Chip and Katherine and the others had been back in… well, whatever time period they had just gone to.

"Um," said a voice beside Angela, and Angela looked to see Emily, whose head was cocked to the side as she looked quizzically at JB. "I don't get it. Those kids were only gone an instant. How'd they get so beat up? Why are you talking about battlefields and boyfriends and time agents, like a lot of stuff happened while they were away?"

"An instant? Are you crazy?" squawked Chip. "We were gone for two years!"

Two _years?_ They'd been gone for two _years?_ Angela knew crazy things could happen with time travel—like her skipping forward three weeks in time, when it felt like she'd only been gone an hour—but two _years_? They didn't look that much older. And what was JB going to do with them now? If they'd just gone back in time and lived two whole years in the past, did that mean that the problems with history were fixed now? Was it possible… that maybe a solution had been found? Maybe no one had to die?

Angela realized that a girl with brown braids was now asking JB the same thing Angela had been wondering about. "Is that what's going to happen to the rest of us? You're going to send us away, and then we're going to come back looking that… weathered?"

"I don't know about the 'weathered' part, but yes, you're all going back in time," JB responded.

Angela felt her heart sink, but then she realized exactly what the girl and JB had said. The girl had asked if they were all going to come back looking so weathered. And JB had said he wasn't sure about the "weathered" part. Not the "coming back" part.

So… was this how it was going to work? Would all the kids still have to go back in time, but they would get to come back? That wouldn't be too bad.

"Now?" the girl asked. She was still talking to JB, but Jonah was the one who answered.

"No."

Everybody looked at Jonah. "Well…" said JB. "Actually, I thought—"

"No," Jonah repeated. "You're going to give us a chance to go home and get used to the idea that we're missing kids from history. You're going to let us eat our favorite foods and hug our parents good-bye if we want to."

JB frowned. Jonah continued. "Look. It's not like we can tell anybody about this, because nobody would believe it anyway. So…just give us some time to adjust."

Kids around the cave were nodding in agreement. JB still looked unsure. It was time for Angela to step in.

"I think you should listen to Jonah," she told JB. "He knows what he's talking about." _Not to mention he's just spent two years in some far-off time period where he had to fight in a battle._ These kids deserved a break. And now that Gary and Hodge were in time prison— _were_ they in time prison?—it should be safe for the kids to return to their normal lives, at least for a little while.

JB glanced over at Hadley, then back at Jonah. "All right," he finally said. "If Jonah thinks that's for the best, that's what we'll do."

"What about us—me and Alex?" Chip asked. "Now that we've been to the past and back, aren't you going to erase our memories or something, so it doesn't mess up our lives now? Like in the _Men in Black_ movies?"

"Chip," said JB, looking puzzled. "We can't do that. It's not possible. Or desirable. Don't people in your time know the difference between science and science fiction?" he asked Angela.

"From my perspective a lot of it looks the same," Angela told him. Time travel, erasing memories—before her first day at Sky Trails, Angela probably would have said both were equally implausible.

Chip started panicking, explaining all the things he'd learned as the king of England— _He was the king of England?_ —and exclaiming that he couldn't go back to who he used to be.

"None of us can, kid," said Hadley sympathetically. "That's the point. You get what you get. Life changes you. Time travel or no, you always have to build on what you live through."

 _That's true,_ thought Angela. It was a wise quote. The time crash had changed Angela's life. Angela couldn't even imagine the last thirteen years of her life the way JB had said they were "supposed to" go—with her meeting some plumber guy and dating him and eventually marrying him and becoming the mother to five kids. She wondered fleetingly if she would have become a pilot—her dream job from the time she was a little girl, and the reason she'd started working for Sky Trails in the first place—then decided it didn't matter. This was life. This was what had really happened. She had to build on what she had lived through.


	15. Chapter 15

Apparently Hadley had brought an Elucidator with him when he'd appeared in the cave, and he handed it over to JB, who used it to return the cave to the twenty-first century. "All right," said JB, before he opened the door. "We're going to hike back to the school, where you'll meet up with your parents. Remember, we just spent an hour or so in the cave talking about—what was it? Identity issues in teen adoptees?"

"Come on, dude," groaned a kid wearing a sweatshirt with a skull on it. "We're not going to tell our parents about time travel, and they wouldn't believe us anyway. Let's just get out of here already!"

"Fine," said JB. "Just make sure you—okay, never mind. We'll get going."

JB led the group of thirty-six kids out of the cave. Angela made to follow them, but Hadley cleared his throat. "Angela, you and I should probably stay here," he said. "JB at least looks like he belongs."

Angela realized that was true. She was still wearing her high heels and business suit, and Hadley was still in his rusty armor. JB had dressed in a hiking outfit before coming to the cave.

Angela watched as the large mass of kids filed down the trail, heading back to—what had JB said, some school where their parents were waiting? They would be okay, she was pretty sure. Even without her help, even without a big brainstorming session, it seemed like a solution had been found. Hopefully JB would explain it to her when he got back.

For now, Angela turned to Hadley. "So you were with the kids, right? With Jonah, Katherine, Chip, and Alex, back in time? What exactly happened?"

Hadley laughed. "That's right, it must have looked pretty strange to you, them disappearing and reappearing and me appearing with them!"

"You'd be surprised. I've seen a lot of strange things."

Hadley nodded solemnly. "That's right. You were the one who saw the time crash, who alerted the airport and helped bring the babies off the plane."

At those words, Angela realized something. JB had said that the moment the babies came off the plane, the Damaged Time had become permanent. So… was _she_ the cause of thirteen years of Damaged Time? Because she'd seen the plane, told people, gone on board and found the babies?

She pondered that for a moment, then decided it didn't matter. It had happened. It didn't matter who had caused it. And even if Angela had caused it, she didn't feel sorry about it. If time hadn't been damaged, either the time agency or Gary and Hodge would have swooped in and taken the babies right away. And none of the kids would have been adopted by their families in the twenty-first century.

If she had caused that specific instance of Damaged Time, that was a good thing, wasn't it?

"In answer to your question," said Hadley, breaking Angela out of her thoughts. "I'll give you the condensed version of what happened back in time. You know that Chip, Alex, Jonah, and the others are missing children from history, right?"

Angela nodded.

"And you know that the time agency thought that the only way to fix the problems caused by the time crash was to send all the kids back to their original time periods, and let whatever was supposed to happen, happen."

"Yes. JB told me that."

"Obviously, nobody at the time agency actually _wanted_ these kids to have to go back in time and die, so we were all looking for other solutions. But it was Jonah and Katherine who found something that actually worked." Hadley laughed. "The mayhem they caused at time headquarters when they grabbed onto Chip! JB sent Alex and Chip back to 1483, a second after Gary and Hodge had snatched them out of time the first time around. Jonah and Katherine were definitely not supposed to go with them, but they managed to convince JB to give them a chance to try to fill the holes left by Hodge and Gary and still bring Chip and Alex back alive. So… he gave them that chance. They got Chip and Alex re-connected with their tracers—which are, well, people from your time period would probably think of them as looking like ghosts—that show what people would have been doing if time travelers hadn't interrupted. Chip and Alex stayed in their tracers for two years, until the battle at which they were supposed to die. Meanwhile, JB pulled Jonah and Katherine out of time after about a day in 1483, and sent them back during the battle. The time agency placed me on the battlefield as backup, to help and protect Jonah and Katherine as they tried to convince Chip and Alex to come back to the twenty-first century. And everything worked perfectly. They pulled Chip and Alex out of their tracers at precisely the right moment."

Angela tried to process everything Hadley had just said. "So… that means Chip and Alex's time period is fixed, right?"

Hadley nodded. "And that's what we're going to try to do for all the rest of the kids as well. We'll send them back in time, but we'll have a time agent pull them out the moment before they're supposed to die. We'll have to be creative at times, but I think we'll be able to do it."

"And…" Angela didn't want to bring this up, but she felt she had to. "What about the twenty-first century? JB told me the twenty-first century was messed up too, because of all the kids being adopted by families who were supposed to adopt other kids, and a bunch of families moving, and how I was supposed to—"she broke off. For some reason, she didn't want to say _I was supposed to marry that plumber_ in front of Hadley.

"The twenty-first century…" Hadley trailed off as well, but he seemed thoughtful. "I haven't been back to the time agency since coming here, so I don't know for sure what they'll decide. But JB and I at least agree that…well, maybe the twenty-first century can be worked with. Maybe we can still find a solution. We didn't think a solution existed for all the other time periods that were messed up, but we have one now. So it's likely that we'll eventually have one for the twenty-first century as well."

Angela smiled at Hadley, and he smiled back. Everything was going to work out. It really was going to work out!

"Well, all the kids have been safely reunited with their twenty-first century families," a voice announced from the doorway of the cave. Angela turned away from Hadley and saw JB walking back into the cave. "We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I'm optimistic about it," he continued. "Angela, how you were asking earlier about finding another solution, one that didn't involve the kids having to stay in their original time periods…We think we've found one."

"I just explained it to her," said Hadley.

"Excellent," said JB. "Those kids!" he grinned and shook his head. "They did everything wrong, and somehow it worked out better than any of our best projectionists could have predicted. We'll still have to examine all the repercussions, of course, but…at least this is a start."

"So what now?" Angela asked. "I know you're eventually going to have to bring each of the kids back in time, but until then…" What she really wanted to ask was, _What can I do?_ Or _How do I fit in to all of this_? But she was afraid. What if JB and Hadley told her that her experience with time travel was done, that now that she knew the truth behind the time crash, and a solution had more or less been found, she had to go back to her normal life again?

Angela didn't have a normal life outside of time travel anymore. Her research had _been_ her life.

"We're going to have a lot of preparation to do before we send any more kids back in time," JB assured her. "But we are going to try to bring every kid back safely. That's a promise."

Angela thought of something else. "What about Gary and Hodge? Where did they go?"

"I sent them to time prison. They're not a threat anymore," said JB confidently.

 _Oh, but they are_ , thought Angela.

It was still possible that when the note referred to Gary and Hodge, it was referring to a version of Gary and Hodge from before the time cave. But it was also possible that it was referring to a Gary and Hodge who had somehow broken out. Either way, Angela realized, she would need to have her own Elucidator for when she went back in time on November 21.

"If Gary and Hodge break out of time prison… or if someone else from Interchronological Rescue decides they still want those thirty-six kids… the kids aren't completely out of danger yet, are they?" she asked carefully. This was as close as she dared to come to asking for an Elucidator. She knew JB wasn't supposed to know about the note, and she still didn't know who the note writer was. It could very well be Hadley.

"It's highly unlikely that Gary and Hodge will be able to break out of time prison," said JB, frowning. "And from what I understand, the rest of Interchronological Rescue wasn't part of this particular scheme. But you do have a point…" JB glanced at Hadley. "How much trouble do you think we'd get in for giving an Elucidator to a twenty-first century time native who already knows about time travel, who could most likely be trusted not to tell anyone else, and who would use said Elucidator for the purpose of keeping an eye on some of our time refugees?"


	16. Chapter 16

" _Twenty-first century time native"—Does that mean me?_ Angela wondered.

Hadley was grinning. "I think we could be pretty persuasive with our case," he said.

JB looked back at Angela. "It probably would be a good idea to have someone who actually lives in the twenty-first century keeping an eye on the missing children. Just in case. So… if you're up for it… I'd like to give you a sort of part-time job. Well, a part-time volunteer job."

Angela nodded eagerly. "I was just wondering what I was going to do with my life now that I've found the answer behind the plane."

"Well, you have the freedom to do whatever you want," said JB. "And you might not want to stay involved with time travel. But—"

Angela cut him off. "I definitely want to stay involved with time travel. Like Hadley said earlier, life's about building on what you live through."

Hadley looked somewhat surprised—and pleased—to hear her quoting him.

"OK, then," said JB. "We'll give you an Elucidator, and you can use it to contact us if you see anything suspicious or out of the ordinary. We don't think you will, but…" he trailed off, looking worried. "It's the twenty-first century. It's already been changed so much by the time crash, we really don't know what to expect. We could really use your help."

Hadley was holding the Elucidator. "Just a minute," he said, typing and swiping through screen after screen. "These twenty-first century cell phone imitations are a piece of work, aren't they? They make removal of a historical costume very tedious." Finally, he must have come across what he was looking for, because a moment later, the armor he was wearing disappeared, and he was left wearing an ordinary T-shirt and jeans.

"Is there anything an Elucidator _can't_ do?" asked Angela, and both Hadley and JB laughed.

"It's true, Elucidators can do a lot," said JB. "We could program it differently, we could lock certain features to make them inaccessible without certain codes…but I don't think that's necessary." He handed the Elucidator to Angela. "You'll just have to promise you'll only use this for communication. Or…" He glanced at Hadley. "Or if we give you permission at a later time to use it for anything else."

"Don't worry," Angela assured the two men. "I'll use it responsibly." Which wasn't exactly the same as promising she'd only use it for communication or with Hadley's or JB's permission. Because who knew why she'd have to take it with her on November 21?

"We need to show you how to use it," said Hadley. "Have you had any experience with an Elucidator before?"

Angela shook her head.

"All right, then." Hadley stepped closer to Angela, right next to her. Angela suddenly felt slightly self-conscious.

"Elucidators change form depending on what time period they're in, so they can blend in with their surroundings. It looks like right now, this one is impersonating an average 2012 cell phone."

Angela agreed. The Elucidator, which she hadn't gotten a good glimpse of before, now definitely resembled an iPhone.

"While it's impersonating this type of phone, it actually operates quite similarly to a phone from your time period—see, I can tap the calling app, and calling options come up."

Hadley tapped the screen and Angela stared. The calling options that came up were much more complicated than anything Angela had ever seen on an iPhone.

"Of course, it's usually easier to just use voice commands," JB added from the other side of Angela. "To activate voice commands you just say, 'Voice commands', and then you ask the Elucidator to do what you want it to do. If you want it to call Hadley, for example, you could just say, 'Call Hadley.'"

Even though they'd already told her that the purpose of giving her the Elucidator was for communication, Angela felt a little thrill of excitement at the idea that specifically "Call Hadley" was an option.

JB and Hadley spent the next several minutes doing stuff on the Elucidator—Angela wasn't exactly sure what—and explaining a couple more things about it, like the fact that it didn't ever have to be charged and that absolutely _nobody_ other than Angela was to use it. Then JB asked, "Do you have any other questions for either of us?"

Questions? All of her original questions had been answered, and most of the questions she had now were questions that JB and Hadley wouldn't be able to answer either.

Except— "Just out of curiosity, why do they call you JB?"

JB's face turned to a look of confusion, and then he laughed. "I honestly have no idea! I thought _you_ might know that! They started calling me that in the time cave, and I decided just to go with it. I kind of like it. It's much shorter and easier to say than my real name."

The three of them laughed together, comfortably, and Angela realized that that was what it felt like to have friends. She'd had friends before, of course, all throughout her childhood, and up through high school graduation. Even up until that first day at Sky Trails. But after that…

After that, well, everyone had started to think she was a nutcase, and after years of hiding from the government, refusing to talk about anything of importance on the phone, and becoming completely obsessed with her research, all of her old friendships had fizzled out. It was a nice feeling now, laughing with JB and Hadley, and knowing that they understood what she had been through, and that they trusted her enough to give her an Elucidator of her own.

But just as quickly as it had started, the moment was over. "All right," said JB. "Angela, since yours is the only Elucidator in here at the moment, I'm going to tell it to send you and itself home and to send Hadley and me to time agency headquarters. And then remember, you can use it to communicate with us whenever you need to, but don't let anyone else use it, and don't let anyone figure out that it's not a phone—"

Hadley laughed. "He likes to worry a lot about nothing. Angela will be fine, Alonzo. Or should I say, _JB._ " He then put his hand on Angela's shoulder and looked into her eyes. "I'm sure we'll see each other again."

Angela couldn't think of anything to say. And a moment later, Hadley, JB, and the time cave had disappeared, and she was whizzing through time.

She landed in her kitchen moments later. It looked the same as it had that morning—rather, the last morning she had been there, which had apparently been three weeks ago. But everything was different now. Angela's life had a new purpose. And she was very, very excited about two things.

Her new job as basically a twenty-first century time agent, helping JB and the rest of the time agency protect the thirty-six kids from the plane.

And the prospect of seeing Hadley Correo again.


	17. Chapter 17

It was the third day since Angela had returned from the time cave, and nothing of interest had happened. Angela had looked through the piles of mail in her mailbox—her monthly disability check from Sky Trails, plus a couple bills and all the random political propaganda that had accumulated over the three weeks she'd been gone. She'd cleared out her fridge, which had been full of disgusting three-week-old leftovers, moldy vegetables, and spoiled milk. She'd cut the grass, trimmed the hedges, and come up with some vague story about a family emergency for the neighbor who'd asked where she'd been all that time.

And then she had sat down at her kitchen table, surrounded by books and papers and research notes that she didn't need anymore, wondering what to do next.

JB had said she should keep her eyes out for anything suspicious, but how exactly was she supposed to go about doing that? And what, exactly, was she looking for? If Gary and Hodge, or any other unethical time traveler, decided to try to grab any of the kids, wouldn't they just appear wherever the kids were at the moment and take them?

Angela aimlessly leafed through her papers—page after page of scribbled notes about tachyons and aging and the speed of light—and then looked at the clock. It was three in the afternoon, and she'd been inside all day trying to decide what to do. She was getting antsy. She needed to do _something._ She needed to at least get out of the house.

 _Maybe I could go check on some of the kids,_ she decided. _Just drive around their neighborhoods, not really slowly or anything, because I don't want to cause suspicion, but just a quick drive-by, make sure I don't see anything out of the ordinary…_

Not like she'd _know_ if anything she saw was "out of the ordinary." But still, it was better than sitting around doing nothing.

She picked up the Elucidator and her car keys and headed out the door. The Elucidator had barely left her side at all over the past two days. She kept it with her almost 24/7, the way most people kept their cell phones. But she hadn't used it. Even though Hadley had programmed it to look and act like an iPhone, she knew that wasn't what it really was. It was a dangerous device, capable of transporting people through time and space, instantaneously changing people's outfits, and—oh yeah—changing people's _ages._ Angela wasn't sure how easy any of those features were to use, and she sure didn't want to do anything by accident that would bring her to some random time or turn her back into a baby. And besides, JB had given very specific instructions that she was only to use it for communication.

It was only once she'd gotten in her car that she realized she didn't actually know where any of the kids lived.

She knew they were all in the general Liston area—spread out across Liston and Upper Tyson and Clarksville, hadn't she seen that on the _Survivors_ list back when Chip had shown it to her at the library? But she didn't remember any of the exact addresses. And she wasn't about to drive around the entire city searching by eye for kids who were probably all safe inside their houses anyhow.

She eyed the Elucidator. Would it be able to tell her the addresses? It probably would. In fact, it would probably be able to guide her directly to each house, like a GPS or something. But that wasn't exactly communication—okay, it wasn't communication at all. Would she get in trouble for doing this? Would JB or Hadley take the Elucidator away?

 _I could always just call them…_ she thought, but discarded the idea. She didn't want to seem like someone who couldn't even do her job without consulting someone else. JB and Hadley wanted her to keep an eye out for anything suspicious or unusual. In order to do that, she needed to find out where the kids were and keep an eye on those areas. Really, all she'd be doing on the Elucidator was a kind of advanced Google search. Or, the futuristic equivalent to a Google search.

"Voice commands," she said, her hand shaking ever so slightly as she lifted the Elucidator and held it the way she would hold a cell phone. "Find Jonah Skidmore's home address."

Words showed up on the Elucidator screen: PLEASE SPECIFY TIME PERIOD.

Of course. The Elucidator was a futuristic device. "Um, October… thirtieth, 2012?" She wasn't sure the exact date was important, but better safe than sorry.

The Elucidator wasn't done. WHICH JONAH SKIDMORE ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

A list of Jonah Skidmores showed up, from what looked like all over the world. Angela tried scrolling through the options, but there were just too many. "Do you have a Jonah Skidmore from Liston, Ohio?" she asked. "One who's thirteen years old right now?"

 _It's not going to work_ , she thought as soon as the words were out of her mouth. According to JB, Jonah wasn't supposed to be in the twenty-first century at all. What if the Elucidator was programmed for original time, in which there was no Jonah Skidmore?

But a result showed up, and Angela could tell instantly that it was the right one because right underneath Jonah's name were the words _Also at this address: Michael Skidmore, Linda Skidmore, Katherine Skidmore._

O-kay. _Kind of creepy how time travelers have this much information about people from the past,_ Angela reflected as she tapped the result. Could time travelers like JB and Hadley access any information about any person in history, whenever they felt like it?

Angela recognized the name of the street Jonah lived on. It was only a couple miles away. She drove through the back roads until she came across it, then slowed down, examining the manicured lawns, picket fences, and nice cars of the people who lived on Jonah's street. _All right, what number am I looking for again? I think the Elucidator said…aha!_ She didn't need a house number. Right down the road, three kids stood in one of the driveways, bouncing a basketball back and forth to one another. Jonah, Chip, and Katherine.

For a moment, Angela considered driving up and saying hi to them, checking in with them, asking how things were going. But she stopped herself. They were just kids. From the looks of it, they were trying to enjoy normal life the way they'd always known it. They already knew everything they needed to know about the time crash and time travel. Angela didn't have anything new to tell them, and she didn't want her presence to worry them. Surely Chip was still recovering from his time in the Middle Ages, and as far as she knew Jonah was still waiting for his turn back in time. There was no reason for her to go talk to them. It was enough to know that they were okay.

With a quick scan of the area to make sure she didn't see anything suspicious—although she still wasn't sure exactly what would count as "suspicious"—Angela pulled into a random driveway and turned around, driving until she was out of sight from the three kids.

"Okay," she said. "Voice Commands. I need the October 30, 2012 home address of Emily…" she trailed off. She didn't remember Emily's last name. She wasn't sure she had ever known it in the first place. Come to think of it, she didn't know _any_ of the kids' last names aside from Jonah's and Chip's, and beyond them and Emily and Alex she wasn't even sure if she knew anyone's first name. "The Emily who was in the time crash in 1999?" she finished lamely, sure the Elucidator wouldn't understand.

But to her surprise, it asked DO YOU MEAN EMILY QUINN? and provided an address in Upper Tyson.

"Do you have addresses for everyone who was in the time crash in 1999?" Angela asked. "All thirty-six kids?"

Results pulled up instantaneously and Angela quickly scanned through them. _Andrea Crowell… Sarah Puchini… Ming Reynolds… Chip Winston…_

She now held in her hand all the addresses she needed.

"Okay… now plot out a route for me, from my current location, that will allow me to drive past every address on this list." She knew she was pushing her luck, but it couldn't hurt to try.

DO YOU WANT THE MOST EFFICIENT ROUTE? The Elucidator asked.

What kind of question was that? "Yes," Angela replied. "I want the most efficient route."

The Elucidator popped up with what looked like a very detailed, in-depth version of Google Maps. "Back up one hundred feet, and arrive at Chip Winston's house," it said, in such a human-sounding voice that Angela actually checked to make sure a person hadn't appeared in the car with her.

Angela decided it didn't matter that she had already passed Chip's house, since she had just seen that Chip was playing basketball with Jonah and Katherine. Instead of backing up to Chip's house, she continued on to the next house on the list, where someone named Daniella McCarthy lived. The house looked as quiet and normal as the rest of the houses in the neighborhood. There were no cars in the driveway, so Angela assumed nobody was home.

She continued following the Elucidator's directions, traveling through neighborhoods and downtown and over the highway, checking out house after house after house. There wasn't much to see. Most of the houses had absolutely nothing happening, and at those that had _something_ happening, it wasn't very interesting. A car backed out of Haley Rivers's driveway. A group of boys played soccer in Dalton Sullivan's front yard. Three ferocious-looking Doberman Pinschers barked at her from Melissa Relwicka's bay window. _Well, we know at least_ _one_ _kid's safe if Gary and Hodge break out of time prison and decide to start kidnapping people again,_ Angela thought wryly. It wasn't exactly true—there were probably hundreds of ways Gary and Hodge could kidnap Melissa without actually breaking in to her house—but it made her smile all the same.

It was getting late. The sun had set, and it was almost completely dark out. "How many addresses do we have left in Liston?" Angela asked the Elucidator.

"There are four Liston addresses on the list that you have not visited today," it replied.

"Okay. Take the Clarksville and Upper Tyson addresses off the list for now, and just direct me to the four that are left in Liston." She would do the other addresses tomorrow.

Nothing of interest was happening at the first and second houses. But as she came across the third house, close to the turn that would lead into her own neighborhood, something caught her eye.

A group of teenagers was hanging out a little ways down the street, near a utility shed that belonged to the nearby elementary school. As Angela drew closer, she noticed that some of the teens were sitting on bikes or standing with skateboards, while a couple others appeared to be spray-painting graffiti on the shed.

It wasn't exactly "suspicious" the way JB had meant it, but the kids definitely were up to no good.

Angela drove closer and watched as the teenagers noticed her car. One jumped on his bike and started pedaling away; another went to hide behind the shed. The remaining four kept their positions, as if they couldn't care less that they were about to get busted.

Angela slowed down and stopped, then rolled down her window. "That doesn't look like something you should be doing," she called to the three boys and one girl who remained.

"Oh yeah, says who?" one of the boys sneered obnoxiously.

"Says the law," Angela replied calmly. "That shed is not your property. It doesn't belong to any of you."

"How do you know?" the same boy taunted, but Angela had already shifted her gaze to the boy standing next to him.

She recognized him. He had been in the time cave. From the way he was staring at her, she could tell he recognized her too.

"Go home," she told him firmly. " _All_ of you. Go home, and stay home. I don't want any one of you to ever go out and deface someone's property again. I'll be keeping my eyes out, and next time, I _will_ get the police involved." She kept her tone calm, but stern, looking at each kid in the eye.

The boy who had been mouthing off to her flashed her a rude hand gesture, but the one she recognized from the time cave muttered, "Come on, you guys, let's get out of here. We'll go to Jake's house."

Angela waited until all five kids—including the one who'd been hiding behind the shed—had headed off in the direction from where she had just come. She had half a mind to follow them—not so much to prevent them from getting in any more mischief, but to make sure nothing happened to the boy from the time cave. But she didn't want to give anyone reason to call the police on _her_ , so instead she just watched them from her rearview mirror until they were out of sight.

Then she consulted the Elucidator to see whose houses they were near. House number three, the one she'd just passed, belonged to Gavin Danes. House number four, which she would come upon next, belonged to Antonio Cadera.

The boy who she'd just seen had to be either Gavin or Antonio. Possibly they had both been there, and she just hadn't recognized one of them. Or maybe one of them was the one who'd sped off on the bike, or the one who had hidden behind the shed. Or, one of them could have just not been involved at all.

Angela proceeded to Antonio's house, where she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then she slowly made her way back to Gavin's house, keeping her eyes out for the teenagers. She didn't come across any of them. Hopefully they'd all obeyed her instructions and gone home.

 _I guess I'll go home too, then,_ she decided. _Everyone seems to be_ _okay_ _. And besides, Gary and Hodge are still in time prison. JB or Hadley would have contacted me if they'd gotten out._

The idea of Hadley contacting her made her smile a little. She rolled her eyes at herself as she pulled halfway into Gavin's driveway to turn around. _It wouldn't be a good thing for Hadley to contact you,_ she reminded herself. _It would probably mean something was catastrophically wrong with time._

Angela's thoughts were slightly disconnected as she made her way home, thinking about Hadley and JB and time and the missing kids and Hadley and how she'd just seen Gavin and/or Antonio spray-painting a shed. Before she knew it, she was pulling into her driveway.

 _All right,_ she thought as she stepped inside and headed straight over to her pantry. _What will it be tonight—chicken noodle soup or beef ravioli?_

She had just finished pouring a can of soup into a pot on the stove when the doorbell rang.

Angela stared at the door, perplexed. Who would be at her door at six in the evening? Who would be at her door, period?

She tossed the can in the recycle bin and cautiously walked to the door. She turned the outside light on and peered out the window.

The person on her doorstep was Hadley.


	18. Chapter 18

Angela flung open the door. "Hadley Correo!" she exclaimed in surprise. Self-consciously, she realized she probably looked like a mess. She was wearing a simple pair of slacks which she hadn't bothered to iron, and a sweater that she had just splashed soup on. And she hadn't looked in the mirror at all today—for all she knew, her hair probably looked terrible.

But Hadley just smiled at her. "Hi Angela," he said. "There's something I need to talk to you about. Is this a good time?"

Angela's first thought was, _He's such a gentleman._ Her second thought was, _Uh-oh, I'm in big trouble._ Of course the time agency had found out she'd used the Elucidator for something other than communication. Hadley had probably come to confiscate it.

"Um… yes. Yes, sure it's a good time. Come on in." Angela stepped away from the doorframe to let Hadley in, acutely aware of the fact that she had never cleaned up the kitchen table from her thirteen-year research project, and that it was still littered with books and papers.

Hadley stepped in and stood awkwardly in the entranceway.

Angela dug the Elucidator out of her pocket and handed it to him. "I'm sorry," she said, not meeting his eyes. What had she lasted, three days as a twenty-first-century time agent? That was hardly better than her one day at SkyTrails.

Hadley didn't say anything at first, and when he finally did speak, he sounded confused. "Are you… resigning?" he asked.

Angela looked up. Hadley was staring at her with a perplexed look on his face.

"I'm—you're here to take the Elucidator back, aren't you? Because I used it for something other than communication?"

Hadley shook his head, a slight smile behind his bushy beard. "No. Somewhat of the opposite, I'd say. The fact that you just spent a good portion of your afternoon checking out the places where 'the Missing' live, convinced several of our colleagues that you really are determined to see this through."

Angela stared at him. "So I'm not in trouble?"

"Nay. Your use of the Elucidator was perfectly safe and reasonable—nothing a 2012 cell phone couldn't do. Well, essentially. Anyway, it didn't endanger anyone, and you weren't using it for time-travel purposes, which is the most important thing. And you _were_ using it to keep an eye on the Missing. Which brings me to the reason I'm here."

Angela felt the slightest twinge of disappointment. Once Hadley had made it clear she wasn't in trouble, she had sort of started hoping that he was just here to pay her a visit. But that was a silly thought. Hadley was a time agent. He was from the future. He had a life in the future, with a job and friends and for all she knew, maybe even a wife and kids. There was no reason for him to visit somebody from the twenty-first century unless it was related to his job.

"So what's the reason you're here?" she asked, trying to keep her tone upbeat.

"Some of the other time agents want to meet you," Hadley explained. "I came to ask if you'd be willing to accompany me to a time hollow where some of my colleagues will be gathering. It might be a good idea for you to have a few other time agency contacts, just in case there's ever a time when you can't reach me or JB."

Was Hadley _expecting_ something to happen that would prevent her from being able to reach him or JB? Angela wasn't sure whether or not she was supposed to be worried. But an opportunity to meet more time agents sounded great. "Okay," she said eagerly. "Right now?"

"Unless you're too tired. You know, since you've had such a busy day."

Angela opened her mouth to protest that all she'd done was drive around for a couple hours—hardly exhausting. Then she caught the expression on Hadley's face. He was kidding.

"Yeah," she agreed, rolling her eyes teasingly. "I'm totally wiped. I think I'd rather go to bed than do something exciting like meeting time agents."

Hadley laughed and typed something into the Elucidator. He put his hand on Angela's shoulder and everything disappeared.

It was slightly awkward, drifting silently through the dark void with Hadley, trying not to think about the feel of his hand still on her shoulder. Angela scrambled desperately to think of something they could talk about. "So," she said finally. "How long have you been a time agent?"

"Oh, gosh, let's see," said Hadley, chuckling. "Well, it takes twelve years to achieve my level of certification…"

"Twelve _years_?" Angela interrupted, aghast.

"Well, I am at one of the highest levels of certification. Some time agents—the ones who don't actually travel _through_ time, but just keep an eye on the monitors and data—only have to train for four to six years. All time agents complete that training first, and then if they want, they can continue on to advanced training, which is the actual traveling kind. All the time agents you'll be meeting today have gone through advanced training."

"Wow," Angela shook her head. "I don't know. Twelve years…that's a lot of dedication."

Hadley raised his eyebrows. "Says the girl who spent thirteen years working on a theory with no confirmation that she was even on the right track. And in an era when the average American life expectancy hadn't even hit 80 yet! If anyone understands dedication, it's you."

Angela looked away, slightly embarrassed at the compliment. Then she realized what else Hadley had said. "What's the average life expectancy in your time period?" she asked curiously.

"Oops." Hadley gave her a rueful grin. "I can't tell you that. I shouldn't have even let it slip that it's higher than in yours. But, in answer to your earlier question, only including time spent in my native time period and _not_ counting my twelve years of training, I've been a time agent for thirteen years."

 _So he became a time agent around the same time I worked for SkyTrails,_ thought Angela, before realizing the illogicalness of her thought. Hadley wouldn't even be born until probably hundreds of years _after_ she'd worked at SkyTrails.

She opened her mouth to ask Hadley how old he was—he had to be older than her, unless he'd started his training before he'd even reached middle school, but he didn't seem a _lot_ older—but at that moment, they hit the uncomfortable part of time travel, where Angela suddenly felt like she was being tossed every which way and torn apart atom by atom and then put back together. And then she arrived on the floor of a brightly lit room that strongly resembled the one JB had taken her to on her first trip through time.

Hadley had somehow managed to land standing instead of lying down—probably one of the things he'd learned during his twelve years of time agent training. He held out his hand to help her up, and Angela took it, meeting his eyes briefly before looking away and letting go of his hand extremely quickly.

That was when she saw the other people in the room. JB, two other men, and three women. The time agents.


	19. Chapter 19

"Good to see you again, Angela," said JB. "I take it Hadley explained what's going on?"

Angela nodded. "He said I'm here to meet some of the other time agents."

"Such as me!" A middle-aged Asian man stepped up and held out his hand to her. "Pleasure to meet you, ma'am. My name is Shen Liu."

Angela shook his hand. "Angela DuPre," she said.

The next time agent—a friendly-seeming woman around Angela's age, with beige skin and dark brown dreadlocks—introduced herself next. "I'm Kylin Correo."

Angela felt her heart sink. _Correo—this must be Hadley's wife_ , she thought. To her surprise, however, Kylin grinned as if she knew what Angela was thinking and said, "No relation to Hadley, as far as we know. Of course, GeneTracker only goes out to the tenth degree of relatedness, so we still could be, like, distant cousins or something."

"GeneTracker?" Angela questioned.

The slender blonde woman standing next to Kylin cleared her throat. "Yes, Angela's a time traveler, and yes, she's working for us, but she's till a twenty-first century _time native,"_ she said sternly, with a reproachful glance at Kylin. "We have to keep her as untainted as possible."

Hadley shot Angela a comical "oops" look, and Angela couldn't help laughing.

The blonde woman arched her eyebrows. "There's something funny about being a time native?"

Yeesh. What was this woman's problem? Angela smiled as politely as she could and held out her hand for the woman to shake. "I'm sorry. It's nice to meet you. You're—?"

"Tida Berkel." Tida didn't shake Angela's hand.

The next two time agents came forward to introduce themselves—an elderly white-haired man named Marrison Wrenley, and a young Indian-looking woman whose name was something like Ariti Demenah Sizzipah. Both of them shook Angela's hand and greeted her warmly, the way Shen and Kylin had. "I'm so honored to finally get to meet you," said Marrison. "I'm very impressed by your determination. You never wavered in your quest to find answers."

"And even when everyone thought you were crazy, you didn't give up like they wanted you to. You stuck to what you knew was the truth," added Ariti.

"And you jumped right in when you got the opportunity," added Marrison.

Angela was embarrassed by the way they were all looking at her, like she was some sort of hero or something. She hadn't done anything extraordinary. She'd just really wanted to find out where the babies were from and how the plane had appeared and disappeared. And jumping right in was just what logically followed finally having her answers.

Hadley seemed to pick up on Angela's discomfort. "While we're all here, I thought we might want to give Angela an update on how things are going with our plans regarding the Missing," he told the room at large.

"I'm not sure that's wise…" began Tida, but Kylin cut her off.

"That's a great idea!" she exclaimed. "JB, you're the head of this operation, so why don't you explain."

"How about we all sit down and get comfortable first," JB suggested, gesturing to the couches that were now lining the walls. Angela could have sworn they weren't there when she'd first arrived.

Everyone made their way to the couches, which were roomy enough to fit several people apiece. Angela ended up between Hadley and Kylin, with Shen on the other side of Kylin, and JB, Marrison, Ariti, and Tida across from them.

"We decided unanimously that probably the easiest, most unobtrusive time mission to start with would be Virginia Dare," JB began. "Are you familiar with who she is?" he asked Angela.

Angela racked her brain, trying to remember what she'd learned in social studies back in high school. Science was her strong point, not history, but she was pretty sure she remembered the gist of Virginia Dare. "She was… wasn't she from the colonial times? Like when America was first becoming a country?"

Tida rolled her eyes in a manner that reminded Angela very much of Monique, her nasty supervisor from SkyTrails. Monique's body language and facial expressions had always seemed to suggest that she thought Angela was very, very stupid for not knowing exactly how to book a flight within her first ten minutes of being on the job. Tida's eye roll seemed to suggest that she thought Angela was an idiot for not being able to give a more eloquent description of Virginia Dare. "She was the first English child born in the Western Hemisphere," Tida said snootily. "But that's not the whole reason she was famous. Of course, people from your time period don't know that yet."

"Then maybe we should just tell Angela the whole reason, rather than trying to make her feel bad about her time period," Kylin frowned in Tida's direction, then turned to Angela. "Virginia Dare was the first English child born in the Western Hemisphere, as Tida said. She was born in 1587, and lived on Croatoan Island with the other colonists and a tribe of natives. But over time, the diseases that the colonists had brought from England ended up killing both colonists and natives by scores. The few that were left—Virginia and a handful of natives—moved away from Croatoan to join another tribe. But in August of 1600, when people from that tribe were starting to fall ill, Virginia headed back to Croatoan on her own to bury the skeletons that were still left there. She believed that by burying all the bones, she could make peace with the 'evil spirits', as they believed the germs to be, by showing that the Croatoans were worthy to live on."

"The problem is, Gary and Hodge didn't do their research. Of course," JB said scornfully. "They snatched her out of history a few days too early—before she had a chance to finish burying the bones. We have a temporary barrier set up to hold the ripple back—if you remember, Angela, I showed you the barriers when I showed you the timeline—but all the barriers are under strain. If the barriers break before we're able to fix time, the changes put in place by Gary and Hodge will ripple out and, in this case, Virginia's absence will mean that the remaining bones never got buried—at least not in the right time period. Croatoan's reputation will be that of a barren and desolate place, a place where evil spirits live. Because of this, it won't end up being colonized until hundreds of years later."

Angela thought about what Kylin and JB had just said. "So Virginia… I mean, whoever she is now, in the twenty-first century… all she has to do is bury the bones? There isn't any danger involved, this time around?"

"In original time, she was supposed to drown right after she finished burying the bones, as she was trying to leave the island," Shen expounded. "But nobody was around to witness what happened, and before time travel most people thought she died a decade earlier anyway, so we'll just take her back to the twenty-first century as soon as she's done with the last bone."

Angela was surprised by how easy it all sounded. "So are you going to do it soon?" she asked.

The time agents all exchanged glances. "That depends on what you mean by _soon_ ," Marrison answered. "On our end, everything's ready, so we're probably going to do it right after we finish up here. In the twenty-first century, though, we're aiming for Saturday. Five days away from the day you just came from. The reason we're waiting that long, rather than just doing it, say, as soon as you return to your native time period, is—well, I'll let Alonzo explain."

Angela didn't remember that Alonzo was JB until he started talking. "Even though this sounds like an easy mission, there are… complications. The girl who used to be Virginia Dare… she actually lost her adoptive parents last year. Well, 'last year' meaning 2011. They died in a car crash."

"Oh, no." Angela's heart went out to the poor girl.

"As you can imagine, the task of burying dozens of skeletons is bound to be difficult—even potentially traumatic—for a girl whose parents so recently passed away," JB continued.

Angela nodded. "So couldn't you wait? In my time, I mean? Couldn't you let her have a few more years before she goes back and does that?"

Tida made an impatient noise. "And what if she dies sometime within those few more years, or what if something happens that creates Damaged Time again? Or what if your time period gets so messed up as a result of all those kids being there, that time travel itself ends?"

 _Is that a possibility?_ Angela thought, startled. Maybe Tida was just trying to scare her. Actually, part of what Tida had just said didn't even make any sense.

"This is _time_ travel we're talking about," Angela pointed out. "Couldn't you right now look back into, I don't know, 2016 or something, and see whether she's alive and whether time is damaged? And if 2016 doesn't work for whatever reason, couldn't you check on 2015 and see if that works?"

"Ordinarily, yes." Hadley jumped into the conversation. "But because the time crash caused so much damage, the early twenty-first century is a special case. The girl in question—her name is Andrea Crowell—wasn't in the twenty-first century in original time, which right off the bat creates a huge amount of uncertainty in regard to how things are going to progress. And then when you add in the fact that she has yet to go back and resolve her original identity, as do thirty-three other kids… everything is still very much in flux."

"Because of all the time travel that still has to happen regarding the Missing, the Elucidators actually won't let us travel to any time beyond 2012 that relates directly to any of those kids' lives," Ariti added. "And they won't show us anything definite, either. If we try to see anything from the future of those kids' lives in the twenty-first century, it only shows 'possibilities.'"

"So a week out is about as far as we're willing to risk for the first mission," said Kylin.

Angela was still confused. "But a week—I mean, is it really going to make that much of a difference in how upset she'll be about burying skeletons?" As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she remembered something Jonah had said back in the time cave. "Oh, I get it—the week isn't so much for that; it's to give her time to adjust to the idea of being a missing kid from history. Right?"

Instead of answering, everybody looked at JB. He shifted uncomfortably. "Um… not exactly. I mean, yes, that's part of it, but it's more because of who'll be accompanying her."

"Oh. So one of you will be going with her?" Angela didn't understand why that would have anything to do with which day in the twenty-first century they took Andrea Crowell from.

"Not one of us," said JB. "My projectionist, Sam, kept running all sorts of projections, trying to figure out who the best time agent would be to send with Andrea, and how much Andrea should know beforehand about her original identity, and all sorts of technical stuff. But with every possibility he tried, the mission wasn't successful. Sam told me that no matter which time agent we picked to go with her, Andrea was distrustful and unwilling to cooperate. And in the few simulations in which she actually did start burying the skeletons…" he shuddered. "What it did to her, emotionally, we would never willingly put any child through that. But Sam eventually found one simulation that worked." JB hesitated, looking like he couldn't believe what he was about to say.

"Go on," Shen urged him. "Tell her what it is."

"In the only simulation Sam found that worked, Andrea didn't have any time agents with her," JB said finally. "But she didn't go by herself either. The people with her were Jonah and Katherine."


	20. Chapter 20

Angela stared at him. "Jonah and Katherine? Jonah and Katherine _Skidmore?_ But—doesn't Jonah still have to go back to _his_ original time period? At some point?"

"Yes," said JB, sighing. "But we're not quite ready for that mission yet. I thought it would be a good idea to postpone all the trips until we have each one perfectly planned out, but Sam was insistent that we do this one right away. And I'm not going to argue with him; he's brilliant. By far the most accurate projectionist I've ever worked with. If Sam's telling me to do something a certain way, he must have a good reason for it."

"And the risk is very low for Jonah," added Hadley. "It's not like we're sending him into an environment like—well, like last time, when he was constantly in danger. He and the others will be alone on the island for the most part, and they'll have an Elucidator and be in touch with JB the whole time. My guess is that the reason this combination worked when the others didn't is because Andrea will be more receptive to emotional support from kids her own age than from adults."

"And dogs," muttered Marrison. "Don't forget the dog."

"Oh yeah," JB gave a disbelieving chuckle. "Because Sam's Sam, and he thinks of everything, he also decided to put in a dog, and I guess that was the magic formula. Andrea, Jonah, Katherine, and a dog."

"Any dog, or a specific dog?" Angela asked.

Kylin was the one to answer. "He said it could be any dog as long as it's good with people. So I went to the animal shelter last night and picked one out. A big sheepdog. Very lovable—the perfect companion for emotional support." She grinned. "Actually, I'm really starting to love him. If he doesn't end up becoming Andrea's dog after he comes back from 1600, I'm keeping him. I've already named him—Dare, after his mission."

Ariti was frowning slightly. "I still don't get why one of us can't go with them. I mean, sure, send Jonah and Katherine and the dog back with Andrea if that's what the projections say. But couldn't we _also_ send a time agent? Just as an extra precaution?"

"I did ask Sam about that," JB admitted. "But he was adamant that it had to be only the three of them. Well, four, counting the dog."

"But the time agent wouldn't have to interact with the kids _or_ the dog," Ariti protested. "He or she could just be there in the background, keeping an eye out in case of an emergency."

"Well, that's kind of what JB's going to be doing," Hadley reasoned. "He'll just be doing it from the control room rather than on the field."

"Which just creates more potential problems," Tida spoke up. "Because the kids will need an Elucidator to be able to communicate with him. We're seriously going to send three twenty-first century children back in time with a fully-functioning Elucidator? At the very least we should put restrictions on it so it can't do anything other than what they'll need it for."

"I'll debrief them on Elucidator safety before they leave. Listen, I know the plan sounds crazy, but Sam swore up and down that this was the only way that would—"

Angela was pretty sure JB's next word would have been _work_ , but she didn't get the opportunity to find out, because right then, another man appeared in the room, and everyone's attention was diverted to him. Angela startled at his sudden arrival, then grinned to herself. It didn't matter that she'd seen it happen before, or that she was in a time hollow, which for all intents and purposes was essentially the future, or even that she'd time traveled herself. She would _never_ get used to seeing people appear out of thin air.

"Sam!" JB exclaimed. "We were just talking about you."

"I predicted as much," the newcomer—Sam—said with a slight smirk. He was a quirky-looking guy, maybe in his mid-thirties, with pale skin, messy blond hair, and a wrinkled white shirt. Angela wasn't exactly sure how "projections" were made, but she had no problem picturing this man spending days on end sitting in front of a computer.

"Angela, this is my top projectionist, Sam Chase," JB explained. "Sam, this is Angela DuPre, the woman who witnessed the time crash."

"I know," said Sam. "At least, I predicted she would be here with you, and that you would be telling her about the Virginia Dare mission. And now I've come to let you all know that it's time to _start_ the Virginia Dare mission."

"Everything's ready?" JB asked.

Sam nodded. "The projections say we should get the ball rolling immediately."

"All right," said JB. "As soon as we leave this time hollow, we'll—"

Sam shook his head. "Unfortunately, staying in this time hollow and talking everything over again and again has a 98% chance of being detrimental to this mission. Too much talking will lead to too much fretting about what could go wrong, which will cause you all to lose faith in the plan we've already devised, which, I might remind you, is based on careful, meticulous projections run assiduously by yours truly. The mission as it currently stands has a 99.99778% chance of success, but that percentage will decrease steadily the longer we spend talking about it."

That was enough to get the time agents moving. "I'll go get Dare," Kylin volunteered. "I'll bring him to your office, JB."

"I can retrieve Andrea Crowell," Shen offered. "Where should I bring her?"

"Bring her to Time Hollow 2856A," said JB. "Kylin, I'll meet you in my office to pick up Dare, and then I'll go get Jonah and Katherine and bring them to the time hollow with Andrea. Sam, will you be in the control room to start?"

"Yes. I'll be communicating with you through earpiece until you send them off."

Ariti volunteered to get the time hollow ready—Angela wasn't quite sure what that meant, but apparently it was a standard procedure. Marrison said he would be on standby in case anyone needed anything, and Hadley offered to escort Angela home. Angela couldn't help feeling excited about the prospect of more time with Hadley.

"Are you bringing me back to the day I left, or to the day when you guys take Jonah, Katherine, and Andrea?" she asked.

It was JB who answered. "The day you left. Barely a second later. It's not good to have you missing from time. I shouldn't have skipped you ahead three weeks that other time, but that was a desperate situation."

So Angela would have to wait four whole days before finding out how the mission had gone. "Do you want me to tell Jonah and Katherine they're going back in time again?" she asked.

The seven time agents and the projectionist all shook their heads emphatically. "If you see them at all, don't tell them a thing," said JB. "I want to give them a chance to recover from their last trip through time before they take another one. That's why we decided to wait a whole week."

"Am I the only one who remembers how rebellious and defiant those kids were during their last trip back in time?" Tida asked. "I'm still not sure giving them their own Elucidator is a good i—"

"Whoopsy-daisy!" Sam held his hands up in the air like a referee. "Success of mission now stands at 99.99543%. That's a .00235% decrease due to unnecessary discussion of the mission. Time to get to our places so we don't damage our chances any more!"

Kylin stepped up to shake Angela's hand once again. "It was nice meeting you," she said, her brown eyes shining with sincerity. "Feel free to call us if you ever need anything—if you have any questions, or want to check up on how our plans are going. Of course, I imagine Hadley will keep you in the loop, but," she shrugged. "The rest of us are options if you can't reach him or JB."

"And one of us will contact you on Saturday, to let you know how things went with Virginia Dare," added JB. "Probably in the afternoon sometime."

"Until then, keep doing what you've been doing," said Marrison, answering Angela's unasked question. "You're doing great."

He, Shen, and Ariti all bade goodbye to Angela, thanking her warmly for coming, and offering their assistance if ever needed. Tida gave her a fake smile and said, "Remember not to tell Jonah and Katherine about what's going to happen. And don't mention time travel to anyone in the twenty-first century."

It took a lot of effort for Angela not to say something snarky back. Instead, she forced herself to smile, and said, "It was nice being here and meeting all of you."

Hadley moved to her side and put his hand on her shoulder, the way he'd done back at Angela's house. "Don't insult Angela's intelligence," he warned Tida. "She knows what she's doing." Looking at Angela, he asked, "Ready to go?"

Angela nodded, and a moment later all of their surroundings disappeared.

"Sorry about Tida," Hadley apologized as he and Angela spun together through Outer Time. "I didn't realize she was going to be so rude. Honestly, I don't even know why she came."

"She kept making comments about my time period and me being a time native. I'm guessing she doesn't approve of people from the past learning about time travel?"

"Technically speaking, the time agency itself doesn't approve of people from the past learning about time travel. We're supposed to do everything we can to keep time on its original track. That's why we were founded in the first place. When time travel was first discovered, people were traveling back in hordes to observe history's most significant dates, to unlock the secrets that had been kept for centuries. Which was fine, as long as they were just observing, but when people started interfering and trying to change things…" he shrugged sadly. "Anyway, though, about Tida, she's definitely a bit of a chronist. I should have warned you."

Angela had never heard of the word _chronist_ before. "What's a chronist?"

"You know how in your time period, people use the words _sexist_ and _racist_? A chronist is like a sexist or a racist, only the basis for their prejudice is the time period someone comes from. Chronists tend to believe that people from their own time period are superior to people from any time period before them. Which they aren't, of course."

"So Tida thinks I'm worthless just because I'm from the twenty-first century?" It was a disappointment to hear that in the future, people were _still_ prejudiced against other people for reasons that were completely out of the other people's control.

"I can't speak for Tida," said Hadley. "I only—" Whatever else he'd been about to say was suddenly torn out of his mouth and lost in the speeding up and jostling around that came with the end of a journey through time.

"Uggh," Angela groaned a minute—two minutes? Three? Four?—later, sprawled out on her kitchen floor. What was it about arriving back home that always made her feel so dizzy and disoriented?

"Uggh is right," said Hadley, sitting up next to her. "I hate timesickness."

"Is that what this is?"

Hadley nodded. "It's like airsickness or seasickness. You don't feel it in time hollows, but that sometimes makes it worse when you return to regular time. Some people have it worse than others, but it should go away soon."

Sure enough, the symptoms were already fading. Angela stood up, and Hadley did the same. "Well," said Angela, "It was nice getting to see you again, and meeting the other time agents. I'll see you on Saturday?" she added hopefully.

Hadley grinned broadly. "I think we can arrange that."

"Great," said Angela, grinning at Hadley for a little too long, before realizing what she was doing and laughing awkwardly. "Well, um, good luck on the Virginia Dare mission,"she added, grateful that her skin was dark enough to hide the blush she could feel creeping up her cheeks.

"Thanks," said Hadley. "I'm sure it'll go smoothly. Keep your Elucidator with you until Saturday, just in case."

"I always keep it with me," Angela assured him, reaching down to pull it out of her pocket.

It wasn't there.

"What?" She felt her other pocket, which was also empty. "I just had it. I was just _using_ it, before we went to the time hollow."

"Oh, wait." Hadley pulled the Elucidator out of his own pocket and handed it back to her. "You gave it to me before we left, remember?"

"Oh. Right." Angela was relieved to have it back in her hands. Her one method of communication with her only friends.

Hadley moved a few feet to the right. "Don't want any of your neighbors to see me disappear," he explained, gesturing toward the kitchen window. Angela hadn't bothered to pull the shade down when she'd arrived home from scoping out the missing kids' houses.

Angela went over and pulled the shade down, just in case. "I'll see you Saturday," she told Hadley.

"I'm looking forward to it," Hadley replied, and disappeared.


	21. Chapter 21

_November 2012_

The Elucidator rang shortly after two Saturday afternoon. Even though Angela had been expecting the call—waiting and waiting for it ever since she'd woken up that morning—the sound startled her. She'd been busy boxing up her textbooks and research notes, trying to decide what to do with them now that she didn't need them anymore.

But that wasn't important right now.

Angela quickly pulled the Elucidator out of her pocket.INCOMING CALL FROM HADLEY CORREO, it read on the screen, with options to accept or decline the call. Angela grinned as she tapped _Accept._ "Hi Hadley!" she exclaimed, holding the Elucidator to her ear as if it really were a cell phone. "How did the mission go?"

There was silence on the other end of the line. Angela moved the Elucidator several inches away from her ear, wondering if the way she was holding it was actually not the way one was supposed to talk on an Elucidator. "Hadley?" she said uncertainly.

"Angela?" Hadley's voice sounded different from usual. Urgent. Strained, even. "Angela, we'd like to pull you to a time hollow. Right now. Is that okay?"

Angela felt a surge of worry course through her. "Is something wrong?"

"We'll explain. Can we pull you out of time right now?"

"Okay." The word was barely out of her mouth before Angela felt herself spinning through time.

Something was definitely wrong. Was it the mission? Had it failed somehow? But the time agents had all been so certain it would work. JB's projectionist was supposedly never wrong.

 _No,_ Angela reminded herself. _JB didn't say that his projectionist was never wrong. He just said that Sam was the_ _most accurate_ _projectionist he'd ever worked with. Just because he's the most accurate doesn't mean he never makes mistakes._

Angela got up as soon as she arrived in the time hollow. Sitting on a couch in front of her were Hadley, JB, and a large gray-and-white sheepdog that she assumed was Dare. Hadley's usually jolly face wore a grim, worried expression, and JB looked so worn out it was almost as if he'd aged a few years since Angela had last seen him.

"What happened?" Angela asked. "Are Jonah and Katherine all right? And Andrea?"

"They're all right," said JB, sounding as exhausted as he looked. "For now."

"For now?" Angela's anxiety increased. "What do you mean, for now?"

"I mean nothing's certain anymore. Time travel itself… I always thought we time agents knew everything there was to know about time travel. But we _don't_. I get the feeling that what we know only scratches the surface."

Angela wasn't sure what he was talking about. "What _happened_?" she asked again. "The Virginia Dare mission…"

"It was a disaster," said JB flatly.

"Not a total disaster," Hadley spoke up reassuringly. "You did the best you could, given the circumstances. Everyone made it out alive, the bones got buried, the artwork was made, time wasn't completely destroyed…"

"It almost was," JB muttered. He made a frustrated noise. "I can't believe I trusted him so completely! Nothing about his plans made sense. I should have known he was stringing me along. But I fell right into his trap."

"Whose trap?" Angela asked.

"Why don't you start at the beginning," Hadley suggested to JB.

JB sighed and looked at Angela. "Remember when we all met in the time hollow, and I was talking about how my projectionist, Sam Chase, was calling all the shots?"

"Of course," said Angela. "I even met him, remember? When he came to tell us that the mission had to be started immediately? You said he was the most accurate projectionist you'd ever worked with."

JB grimaced. "Yes, well, it turns out he was also the most _manipulative_ projectionist I'd ever worked with. He had a reason for arriving in that time hollow as soon as people started pointing out the problems with his plan. He betrayed us. All his careful planning—using Jonah and Katherine instead of a time agent, sending them off without briefing them first, even sending Dare with them—all of that was part of a bigger plan of his that almost ruined time completely. As it is, we don't even know all the ramifications of his actions."

"What did he do?" Angela asked in horror.

JB started counting off on his fingers. "First of all, he told Andrea that if she typed a certain code into the Elucidator I gave them, she would be able to go back a year in time and save her adoptive parents from dying. What the code actually did was bring Andrea and the others to the wrong island—with _out_ the Elucidator. So I had no contact with them, and no clue where or when they were." He looked like he could hardly bear thinking about it.

"Second of all," he continued, "He took two of the other missing kids from history, who weren't supposed to have their turns back in time yet, and made it so they ran into Jonah, Katherine, and Andrea. He also used something called a time smack, which—I won't get into all the technical details, but essentially what it did was shift time just enough to loosen the connection between the real people and their tracers. Which made it possible for him to alter original time."

"Alter _original_ time?" Angela stared at JB, then at Hadley, sure she'd misheard. "But—that's not possible, is it? I thought original time meant that no time travelers had ever touched it."

"So did we," said JB darkly. "That's what I meant when I said that what we know barely scratches the surface. We had so many misconceptions about time… we were wrong about so much. We probably still are."

"So… what did he change?" Angela asked, slightly afraid to hear the answer.

JB sighed. "The other two missing kids he put in that time period—One Who Survives Much and Walks With Pride—they were never supposed to meet up with Virginia. Additionally, Virginia was never supposed to meet up with her grandfather, John White, who'd come back from England to look for his family. Those two things were changed. But those two things are nothing compared with what Second did next."

"Second?" Had Angela missed something?

"Sam," JB clarified. "He renamed himself Second Chance. I guess he thought that was more suitable for his new occupation of ruining time. Anyway, after he'd successfully messed up 1600, he moved on to 1611, and destroyed Henry Hudson's final voyage to the New World so badly that all the tracers disappeared."

Angela remembered that tracers were the ghostly representations of what would have happened if time travelers hadn't intervened.

"Did you have to go there?" she asked. "Then, I mean? To 1611, after you'd finished dealing with what happened in 1600?"

JB closed his eyes as if the memory was too painful even to think about. "No," he said in a strained voice. "It took me forever to figure out where the kids were and even that Second was behind it. At first, when I couldn't get in contact with them through the Elucidator, I thought it was just a technology error. I was going to go in and give them a new Elucidator. But when I consulted the time map to find their geographical location, nothing showed up. I got the agency involved and we started frantically searching to find them. Sam was giving me all sorts of ideas about where they might be—leading me on several wild goose chases. And then I went into his office to ask him a question and saw that he wasn't there."

Dare whined and JB started petting him comfortingly. But it looked like JB was the one who really needed to be comforted.

"While I was in his office, I started looking through his data," JB continued. "Which is obviously what he expected me to do, because I found a lovely pre-recorded video message from him, to me, explaining that his name was now Second Chance and that he was off to make his mark on history and if I really wanted to save Jonah and Katherine and Andrea and time, I should go to a certain time hollow, where I'd receive my instructions."

Angela raised her eyebrows. "That sounds fishy."

"I thought so too," said JB. "I wanted to see if I could find them without obeying what he said, because it sounded so much like a trap. So we kept searching, and eventually Ariti found the time smack, and we were able to watch everything that happened after that, up until the point at which original time changed. I told my Elucidator to bring me right to that point, and it said it couldn't."

"Because Second had already messed it up so much that it was Damaged Time?"

"Good guess," said JB dryly. "If only that were the case. No, that wasn't the reason. I tried to get in at every single second of Jonah, Katherine, and Andrea's time in 1600. I tried to get in before they arrived; I tried to get in at different geographical locations, and all my Elucidator would tell me each time was 'Not possible at this juncture.' Finally I decided to follow Second's instructions and go to the time hollow, because that was all I had left to go on."

"And what did you find there?" Angela asked, a sense of dread creeping over her. Surely it hadn't been anything good.

"I found Katherine and a boy I didn't recognize. They insisted that the boy was Jonah, historically costumed as John Hudson, Henry Hudson's son, who was one of the missing children from history. They told me a long story about how…" he trailed off, shaking his head again in what could've been disbelief or dismay. Or both. "About how I came and time-smacked Second while he was talking to them on Croatoan Island, and then I sent all the kids away to the site of the next time barrier, but Dare and I stayed on the island with Second. Then, they told me, the other three kids—Andrea and Brendan and Antonio—came back to where I was, and Jonah and Katherine continued on. They went to 1611, on Henry Hudson's ship up in the James Bay, and I supposedly talked to them through the Elucidator and told them that they were there to fix this part of history, only Jonah had to fill in for John Hudson because the real John Hudson was missing."

"Wait," said Angela, confused. "Missing _again_ , you mean? Like, not just missing from 1611 because Gary and Hodge kidnapped him?"

"Supposedly that was what I had said," said JB. "And then they told me that I'd remotely given Jonah a historical costume to make him look like John Hudson, and turned Katherine invisible. And shortly after that, their Elucidator had stopped working and all the tracers had disappeared."

"So how did they get back to tell you all this in the time hollow?" Angela asked.

"Second," JB said with a grimace. "Essentially his plan was to use Jonah and Katherine as pawns to achieve his ultimate goal. They lived through a very messed-up day on the _Discovery,_ and then, because time was on the brink of falling apart completely, it was possible for them to go back to a time they'd already lived through and make different choices this time around."

" _What_?" Angela felt like she'd missed something. Or maybe what she'd thought she knew about time travel wasn't accurate. "I thought you told me it wasn't possible to go back to a time you'd already lived through. The paradox of doubles?"

"I did tell you that," said JB. "And ordinarily, it's not possible. But apparently the rules are different when time is on the verge of collapsing."

"So… that was Sam's goal? To collapse time?" It didn't sound like a very sensible goal.

JB shook his head. "Not to collapse it, no. Sam's goal was to split time into two different dimensions."


	22. Chapter 22

Angela wasn't sure she understood. "Two different dimensions? Doesn't time already split into different dimensions whenever someone time travels?" She remembered what JB had told her about how her life would have gone had she never witnessed the time crash. For JB to be able to see that, it had to exist somewhere, right?

Hadley spoke up. "Not different dimensions. There's original time and there's time that's been changed by time travelers, but when a time traveler changes something in the past, it essentially overwrites original time. Makes it so original time never happened. That's why it's so dangerous to meddle with the past. That's why we have to worry about paradoxes."

"Yes." JB was speaking through clenched teeth; he looked more tense than Angela had ever seen him. Next to him, Dare jumped off the couch and started trotting around the room. "But at least when people meddle with time in _our_ dimension, we can see exactly what they did. We don't know anything at all about this other dimension—the Elucidators don't have any information about it. But it's been sealed off so effectively that it doesn't seem like there's any chance of anyone getting in or out."

A horrifying thought struck Angela. "What about Jonah and Katherine? Which dimension did they end up in?"

"Ours, fortunately. The choices they made the second time around enabled time to flow essentially on its original path, and at least Second had the sense enough to wait until Jonah had lived out John Hudson's last moments before pulling him and Katherine to the time hollow to meet me. But just the fact that he sent them from that time to meet me before I'd even gone to the island… that in itself is almost as horrifying as everything else he did. Time travelers are _never_ supposed to meet on opposite ends of a time-travel journey. Too high of a likelihood for paradoxes."

"But it sounds like what happened with you and Jonah and Katherine was sort of the opposite of a paradox," Angela pointed out. "They told you what you had already done, in their perspective, and then you were able to do it. Right?"

"To an extent," JB agreed. "We're just lucky the Elucidator kept a transcript of everything they'd heard me say while they were in 1611. I was able to pre-record those messages onto their Elucidator, and then go to 1600 to give it to them. Still… the margin of error was so narrow. One little mistake on any of our parts and all of time would have been doomed."

Everyone was quiet for a while, letting that word, _doomed_ , sink in. Dare whined and plopped down at JB's feet. Then Angela asked, a little anxiously, "But Virginia Dare's time _is_ fixed now, right? She won't have to go back again?"

"She definitely won't have to go back again," JB answered. "And neither will One Who Survives Much or Walks With Pride. Oops—I mean, Brendan or Antonio. Sorry. It's going to be hard for me to get used to calling them those names now after five years of knowing them by their Algonquian names."

Angela stared at him, sure she'd just heard him wrong. "Five _years_?"

"You didn't tell her that part yet," Hadley reminded JB.

"The part about how weird it feels to be back in the modern age after half a decade of living in a hut?" JB grinned wryly, but when he looked back at Angela, his expression was serious once more. "I told you how Second had messed up 1600 pretty badly. When Andrea, Brendan, and Antonio came back to join me on Croatoan after I sent them away, time had had enough. From that day until August 11, 1605, became Damaged Time."

"And you were stuck there all that time?" Angela couldn't even imagine.

JB nodded. "Brendan and Antonio's tribe took me in—they took in Virginia and her grandfather too. And Dare here." He bent down and rubbed Dare's belly appreciatively. "They were very good to us. But it was hard, living in such a primitive time period, not having contact with anyone from the time agency, not knowing what was happening with time, not knowing what would happen with Jonah and Katherine in that time hollow… until Jonah saved my life. And the lives of everyone in my tribe."

"I still can't believe how perfect the timing was," Hadley commented, an expression of wonder on his face. "If Damaged Time had ended just a few minutes later…"

"We all would have been dead," JB finished solemnly. "A wildfire was in the process of overtaking our village," he explained to Angela. "But by some miracle, Damaged Time ended at just the right moment for Jonah to be able to come in and rescue each and every one of us. He sent us all to the time hollow he and Katherine had been in. Including…" he frowned. "Including Dalton Sullivan, the boy who was John Hudson in original time. Second had taken him out of the twenty-first century and placed him there in our village a moment after Jonah arrived."

Angela could sense that this was a problem, but she wasn't exactly sure why. "Was Second hoping he would die in the fire?" she asked, trying to make sense of things.

"I don't think so," JB answered. "But it shouldn't have been _possible_ for Dalton to go into 1605. He had already lived out the entire 1605 as John Hudson, six years before Gary and Hodge kidnapped him."

Angela's head was spinning. "So that means…"

"We don't fully know what it means," said JB. "Currently, our top time researchers are trying to figure it out. We think the effects of the time split in 1611 rippled backward, and created a lot of… unsettled time, for lack of a better term. And maybe, because everything was still up in the air about what would happen and whether time would even survive, that made it possible to violate the paradox of doubles yet again." He shrugged. "There's a lot we have yet to understand. Second was light years ahead of us."

Angela was quiet for a moment, thinking about how close time had come to collapsing even as a result of what the time agents had been certain would be the easiest mission. "How are you going to prevent stuff like this from happening when the rest of the kids go back in time?" she asked. "What if Second comes back again? Or Gary and Hodge, or someone new?"

JB and Hadley exchanged glances. "We're not sure yet," Hadley admitted. "For now, we're imposing an indefinite ban on all time travel before the twenty-first century. The remaining thirty kids' time-travel trips are being postponed until the agency understands more about the way time travel works in the midst of catastrophes."

"Only before the twenty-first century?" Angela was surprised.

"The twenty-first century is in flux anyway," Hadley explained. "We just don't want to risk changing anything before that."

Was that another way of saying, _The twenty-first century is already so messed up that it doesn't matter what we do to it_?

"Speaking of the twenty-first century," said JB, "Angela, I know you've been keeping your eyes on all the missing kids, and I'd like you to keep checking up on them every so often. But in light of what just happened, your primary focus should now be on Jonah and Katherine."

"What about Andrea and the others? Antonio and Brendan and—Dalton, did you say?"

"Keep an eye on them too, for sure. But I think—and the rest of the agency agrees with me—that Jonah and Katherine are now in the most danger. Out of all the kids, they're the ones who know the most about time travel and have the most experience. Because of all the contact they've had with me, there's a concern that someone would kidnap them to try to force the time agency into making rash decisions to save them. And because they just saved all of time, they're also targets for the Garys and Hodges of the world who are looking for brave, resourceful, famous kids to unage and sell in the future."

 _And maybe even Gary and Hodge themselves,_ thought Angela. Her heart started beating faster as she remembered who had given her the note at the airport during her one day with SkyTrails—the note about going back to 1932 and rescuing someone from Gary and Hodge. _It was a young teenage boy, wasn't it?_ She strained to picture what the boy had looked like, but all she could remember was that his choice of clothing had been unusual and that he'd had a baby with him. _Could that boy possibly have been Jonah? Is it_ _Jonah_ _I'm going to have to rescue from Gary and Hodge?_

The idea almost made sense. Jonah knew Angela had worked at the airport that night, and since the plane hadn't appeared yet, it was possible for him to be in that time period at that moment. But if he was going to be able to travel to 1999 to leave the note with her, why on earth would he still need her to rescue him in 1932?

Unless the situation was going to be like the almost-paradox JB had just described, and Angela would end up rescuing Jonah from Gary and Hodge _before_ he gave her the note that said she would need to do that.

Angela realized that she'd just been spacing off and not paying any attention to whatever JB or Hadley had just said. They were both looking at her expectantly. "I'm sorry, what?" she said, flustered.

"Do you know how to get to the time cave?" JB asked.

"The one we were in last week, you mean? The one Gary and Hodge had all the kids trapped in?"

"Last week to you, five years ago to me," JB muttered. "That's the one."

Angela shook her head. "I never saw where it actually was. I time-traveled both into and out of that cave."

"It's not that far from where you live, actually. Up in the nature preserve behind Clarksville Valley High School. You can get directions on your Elucidator. Anyway, the time agency has scrutinized the cave and everything in it, and we're 99 percent certain that it was only ever Gary and Hodge who were using that cave—not the entire Interchronological Rescue. Now that Gary and Hodge are out of the picture, the time agency has determined the cave to be safe. There are monitors in there, and if you hook your Elucidator up to them, you'll be able to watch exactly what each of the thirty-six kids from the time crash were doing up until the moment you entered the cave. And since the cave doubles as a time hollow once you type in the code, no time at all will pass while you're in there."

Angela wasn't sure how she felt about this. "So, like… you want me to _spy_ on the kids?" Driving past their houses was one thing, but watching every move they made seemed a lot more intrusive.

"Don't you think that's better than the alternative?" JB asked. "Of course, the time agency is keeping an eye on all of them as well, so if that's not something you feel comfortable doing, it's fine. I just wanted you to know that it's an option."

Angela would have to think about it.

"In case you do decide to go, the code on the keypad is now 36RR," Hadley put in. "It stands for Thirty-Six Returned and Rescued."

Dare had stood up again, and was once more pacing the room, sniffing the walls and whining in a forlorn sort of way. JB stretched and stood up as well.

"I imagine time hollows are pretty boring places for dogs," he commented. "I guess I'll go return him to Kylin now. Although after spending all that time with him in the 1600s, I'm really going to miss him."

"Not if you finally take my suggestion," said Hadley, raising an eyebrow and giving JB a teasing sort of smile.

JB made a face at him. "Yeah? Well, I'm still waiting for you to take your own advice," he retorted in the same teasing tone of voice, with half a glance over in Angela's direction. "Anyway, see you later. Angela, we'll be in touch."

JB and Dare disappeared. Angela turned to Hadley, whose face looked unnaturally red. "Your suggestion?" she questioned.

"Oh, everybody at the time agency knows JB likes Kylin," Hadley explained with a chuckle. "And it's completely obvious that she likes him too. But they're both way too involved in their careers to do anything more than say hi to each other outside of work. I keep telling him he should ask her out, but I think he's scared she'll say no."

"And what was he saying about waiting for you to take your own advice?"

Hadley's face grew even redder, and he looked down at the solid, nothing-colored floor of the time hollow. "Um… well…"

Angela felt her own face heat up too, as her heart pumped wildly. She wasn't ready for this. She hadn't felt this way since high school. She had no idea how to act or what to do. So she settled for changing the subject.

"Hey, do you think you could show me how to get to the time cave?"


	23. Chapter 23

They went to Angela's house first. They got in her car, and Hadley set the Elucidator to give them directions to the time cave. "I'll show you how to work the monitors when we get there," Hadley promised. "Even if you don't end up using them to keep an eye on the children, it'll still be good for you to know how. Just in case."

Angela followed the Elucidator's instructions, feeling slightly self-conscious about her driving habits. It was weird, having someone sitting in the passenger seat of her car. Angela hadn't driven a car with other people in it for… well, almost thirteen years. Of course, Hadley was from the future, so simply being in a twenty-first century car was probably the strange part for him.

"What are cars like in your time period?" Angela asked. "Do people even still use cars, or do they travel a different way?"

"I really wish I was allowed to tell you," said Hadley apologetically. "But it's strictly forbidden to allow time natives to learn about anything from a time period later than their own."

As best as she could while driving, Angela directed a pointed look toward the Elucidator.

"I know, I know," Hadley laughed. "Sometimes we break our own rules. But only when we have a valid, legitimate reason that would stand up in time court. And, unfortunately, curiosity is not a valid, legitimate reason that would stand up in time court."

Angela turned onto the main road, and Hadley looked around with enjoyment at the road signs, traffic lights, stores, and restaurants they passed. "I really do love this time period," he commented. "It really was—is—such a pivotal era in history, with all that's going on in world politics, and technological advancements…"

It was Angela's turn to laugh. "Yeah, right. I'm sure our 'technological advancements' are _nothing_ compared to what you guys have in the future."

"But your era's technological advancements are what paved the way for the kinds of technology we have in the future. It's all interconnected," Hadley countered.

Angela pulled out onto the highway, and they spent the ride up to Clarksville discussing the various advancements that had taken place during the twentieth century—Hadley didn't want to risk accidently letting anything slip if they talked about the twenty-first century. Eventually, the Elucidator led them to a small parking lot with a wooden sign that read _Clarksville Nature Preserve: No hunting, no smoking, no littering. Violators will be prosecuted._ Next to the sign was another sign, with a map of what looked like trails through the woods.

"The cave you're looking for is a quarter mile southeast from you," the Elucidator said. "At the present time, no roads exist from your current location to the cave. Would you like me to direct you via a walking path?"

Angela and Hadley looked at each other and shrugged. "If it's just a walking path, we can probably find out way on our own," Hadley reasoned.

The walking path turned out to be wide and comfortable, surrounded by large trees that were filled with cheerfully chirping birds. It was a peaceful place, separate from the bustling world they'd come from. "Are there still places like this in your time period?" Angela asked. She was thinking of science fiction movies she'd seen in which the future was always an industrial-looking place full of skyscrapers and phony trees and very little actual vegetation.

"Some," Hadley answered. "Actually, this is the kind of place JB wants to send his Algonquin tribe to, since their original village was destroyed in the fire of 1605. They'll be able to keep their way of life relatively the same as it was before, and because it's a nature preserve, they won't have to worry about their land being taken over by urban developers." He gave Angela a mock exasperated look. "And I just realized I did it again."

"Did what again?"

"Told you about the future! Boy, if we keep hanging out together, pretty soon you'll know as much about my time period as I do!"

Angela grinned. "Well… what you just told me _does_ relate to the missing children, in a way, so I think you can be excused for that one. Plus, I kind of led you into it."

They continued following the trail until they reached a giant rock formation, a hundred feet wide and almost as tall. "Um…" said Angela, staring up at it. "Is that the cave?"

"I think so." Hadley looked the formation up and down. "I don't see the entrance, though. That must be on the other side."

"I thought we told the Elucidator to give us the most direct route."

Hadley consulted the Elucidator they'd been using for directions in the car. "Oh. We told it to give us the most direct route _to_ the cave, not _into_ the cave." He rolled his eyes. "One thing about Elucidators—you have to be very precise with them; tell them _exactly_ what you want. Otherwise, they'll be sure to find some way to mess up your instructions. Elucidators are extremely useful, but they're still just machines."

Hadley pulled up a map on the Elucidator, which showed them how to get to the entrance of the cave. There were no walking trails leading around the rock formation, so they had to struggle through waist-high weeds and thorn bushes for several minutes before reaching the other side.

"Did Gary and Hodge really take the kids through all that mess?" Angela asked, detangling a final thorn branch from her jeans.

"No, they took them around the other way, through some trails behind Clarksville Valley High School." Hadley pointed ahead of them, into a thicket of trees that canopied a trail similar to the one they'd been on before hitting the thorny area. "That's the way we should have gone. I didn't know the other way wouldn't lead us to the actual entrance."

"Well, we're here now," said Angela, stepping into the cave. Hadley drew her attention to a small keypad on the rock wall, and she watched as he typed in the code: 3-6-R-R. The cave door closed with a heavy grinding sound.

Angela looked around. The cave looked the same as the last time she'd seen it, minus the thirty-six kids and the constant chaos that had been ensuing. Dark walls, high ceiling, long benches and a single lightbulb. She didn't see anything that looked remotely digital. "Where are these monitors you've been talking about?"

"Way in the back." Hadley started walking toward the dark section of the cave, the same place Angela had appeared when JB had sent her here the first time. Angela followed, slightly skeptical. She didn't remember seeing any monitors back then. Of course, back then her mind had been occupied by a lot of other things.

Hadley showed Angela a small crevice in the rock wall and instructed her to place her Elucidator in it. Then he pointed to a small button embedded next to the crevice. If Angela hadn't been paying such close attention, it would have just looked like part of the rock. "Press that button," he said.

Angela did.

The dark section of the cave suddenly became the brightest area Angela could see. TV monitors lined the walls—rows and rows of them. Each seemed to be showing a different scene—mostly bedrooms or kitchens or living rooms or the outsides of houses.

 _Familiar-looking houses,_ Angela thought. Hadn't she just driven by these very houses less than a week ago?

Oh, yeah. There were people on each screen too. Sometimes more than one person, other times just one middle-school-aged kid.

The missing kids from history.


	24. Chapter 24

"You have a monitor set up to spy on each kid wherever they go?" Angela asked, half horrified, half fascinated. On one hand, it seemed like a terrible invasion of privacy—did these monitors follow the kids even when they were using the toilet or taking a shower? On the other hand, it was pretty impressive that the time agents were able to do this, and if Gary and Hodge were going to escape from time prison, it would be very important to keep such a close eye on the children.

"Aye," Hadley answered. "Like JB said, Gary and Hodge were actually the ones who set this system up, when they furnished this cave in the 1990s. But it works for our purposes too."

Angela felt a slight flicker of nervousness at the mention of Gary and Hodge. "Are you _sure_ it's not possible for them to break out of time prison?"

Hadley seemed to consider her question. "I suppose anything's possible," he finally said. "But the time police have them under careful surveillance. And they don't have access to any kind of technology that would allow them to escape."

The answer was not altogether comforting, but Angela couldn't think of a way to share her uneasiness without tipping Hadley off to the fact that she knew she was eventually going to have to rescue someone from Gary and Hodge. So she just turned her attention to the monitor in front of her, where a boy was tossing a football back and forth with a man who was probably his dad. "Who's that?" she asked.

Hadley leaned over toward the Elucidator that was lodged in the crevice in the wall. "Michael Kostoff," he answered.

Angela watched Michael, the way his face was alight with enjoyment as he and his dad tossed the ball back and forth, joking about getting drafted into the NFL. If Michael was worried about his eventual trip back to his original identity, he didn't show it.

Angela looked around at the other monitors. "Which one is Andrea Crowell?" she asked.

Hadley squinted at the Elucidator. "Monitor 23. So… this one." He motioned toward a monitor a few feet away. "Start with right after Andrea was rescued from 1605," he instructed the screen.

Angela moved closer to get a better view of the screen. It was showing a bunch of people in what looked like a time hollow. Most of the people had relatively dark skin and hair, and were wearing some variation of loincloths or deerskin dresses. A human-shaped, translucent figure—made of glass? Crystal?—was running around the room, calling frantically for Jonah. After studying the figure for a moment, Angela gasped. "Is that _Katherine_? Why does she look like that?"

Hadley looked surprised at the question. "I forgot you've never been invisible before," he said. "That's what time travelers look like when they have an Elucidator make them invisible. We can see her because we've traveled through time, but people who have never traveled through time wouldn't be able to see her at all."

Angela hadn't even known Elucidators could turn people invisible. She filed the information away in her brain, knowing she might end up needing it in 1932.

Then she returned to watching the screen. Small groups of additional people kept appearing in the time hollow, looking around with dazed or frightened looks on their faces. Katherine was still freaking out, and a Native American man with lighter hair and skin was assuring her, "He's all right. People wouldn't still be appearing if he wasn't all right." But he looked concerned too.

Angela did a double take. He wasn't a Native American. He was JB.

Finally, Jonah appeared on the floor, seemingly unconscious. Katherine ran over and started alternating between hugging and hitting him. As more people flocked over toward Jonah, Angela scanned the crowd, trying to figure out which girl was Andrea Crowell. She didn't _think_ Andrea would have Native American features, but the only white girl in the room other than Katherine looked several years older than thirteen.

But wait—JB had said the he and the others had been stuck in the 1600s for five years.

"Is that her?" Angela asked, pointing to the girl in question. Hadley nodded.

"But she's eighteen now! And she _looks_ eighteen! How are you going to explain that to her family?"

"JB unaged her back to thirteen on her way home. You'll see."

They continued watching as everyone tried to figure out what was going on. A boy came forth and introduced himself as Dalton Sullivan, and then a voice started emanating from the time hollow. JB was the first to figure out it was Second. Second explained, through a pre-recorded message, about how he had split time and Katherine and Jonah had saved it. He added that it was all over and everybody could go home. JB pressed a button on the Elucidator he was holding, and Jonah, Katherine (fully visible again), and Dalton vanished. Then the camera zoomed in to show JB talking with Andrea and two boys who looked around her same age. One of the boys looked vaguely familiar to Angela, and when she heard him being called Antonio, she realized why. He was one of the teenagers she'd caught vandalizing the shed a few days before. Not the one with the purple hair who had obviously recognized her, and not the obnoxious loudmouth, but the other boy who had stood there while she was talking to them. At least she was pretty sure it was him.

JB was looking at all three young adults seriously. "You know I'm going to have to send all of you back too," he told them.

Antonio gave him a pained look. "How are we supposed to go back to our old lives after living in the 1600s for five years? Do you even know how weird that's gonna be?"

"It's going to be weird for me too," JB said soothingly. "But we'll all re-adjust."

"We don't have to go back to being thirteen again, do we?" the other boy—Brendan, right?—asked.

"I'm afraid you do," JB replied. "I don't think your families would be too pleased to have you age five whole years in what to them seems like a matter of seconds."

"Mine would," Antonio mumbled. "Then they could finally kick me out of the house."

JB gave the boy a stern but compassionate look. "Antonio, over the five years I've known you, I've watched you grow into a mature, helpful, community-oriented man. I have no doubt that you'll be able to carry those same traits into the twenty-first century with you, and that alone will eliminate some of the problems you were having with your family before."

"And at least we have our art now," Brendan added grudgingly. "That'll help keep us occupied."

"What about my grandfather?" Andrea spoke up. "Can he come live with me in the twenty-first century?"

JB sighed. "I'm going to have to consult with the time agency before I can come up with a definite placement for him and the rest of the tribe. But I promise I will do whatever I can to ensure that you and your grandfather will still be able to see each other."

There was a little more talk about the kids' transition back to the twenty-first century, and JB assured all of them that he would check in with them periodically to see how they were re-adjusting. Andrea gave her grandfather a hug and a kiss goodbye and promised she would see him soon. Then JB sent her home.

As Angela and Hadley watched, Andrea shrunk, her facial features changing ever so slightly until she looked thirteen again. Seeing her as a thirteen-year-old, Angela remembered her from the time cave. She was the girl who had asked JB if everyone was going to go back in time and return looking weathered.

Andrea landed in a small bedroom with light blue walls, and—Angela blinked in surprise—the deerskin dress she'd been wearing instantaneously changed into an ordinary T-shirt and shorts. She laid on the floor for a couple minutes before getting up slowly and looking around. Her eyes fell on the bed, the dresser, the bookshelf, and the desk in turn, her expression a strange mix of sadness, apprehension, and acceptance.

There was a knock at the bedroom door. "Come in," Andrea said uncertainly.

A woman stepped into the room. "Andrea? I know you said you'd rather stay and do your own thing, but I just wanted to check one last time if you want to go out for ice cream with Uncle Rob and me."

Andrea stared up at the woman, and after a moment, her eyes filled with tears. "Aunt Patty," she choked out, standing up and walking over to give the woman a hug.

The woman—Andrea's Aunt Patty—looked surprised, but returned the hug. The two stayed in each other's arms for a long time.

Angela had to look away. She felt like she was intruding on a private moment.

"Do Jonah and Katherine have monitors?" she asked Hadley.

"Jonah does. Katherine's not a missing child from history, so she doesn't have her own, but we can see her when she's with Jonah."

They moved over to Jonah's monitor and watched as Jonah and Katherine appeared in their own driveway, where Chip and Alex were standing.

"Wow," Chip commented, blinking in surprise. "That _was_ fast."

Jonah and Katherine, both looking dizzy from timesickness, exchanged glances. "How long did it look like we were gone?" Katherine asked.

Alex shrugged. "You flickered out of sight for, like, a second, and then you came back. But how long were you really gone? Where'd you end up going?"

"How about we go inside and get a snack, and we'll tell you while we're eating?" Jonah suggested. "I'm starving."

The four kids traipsed into Jonah and Katherine's house, where Jonah and Katherine raided the fridge and pantry and started telling Chip and Alex essentially what Angela had already heard from JB.

Angela looked around at the other monitors. Two of them were playing the same scene as Jonah's—she assumed those were the ones set to show Chip and Alex. There was Emily, the girl who'd helped Angela in the time cave, reading a thick book in a comfortable-looking living room. There was another girl Angela recognized from the time cave, shopping at the mall with a bunch of friends, and a boy who looked somewhat familiar playing a video game in a messy bedroom.

And there was the boy with the purple streak in his hair, the one who'd been spray-painting the shed with Antonio and the other kids.

"Is that Gavin?" Angela asked, pointing.

Hadley consulted the Elucidator. "Yes. Gavin Danes."

On the monitor, Gavin was having a heated argument with a woman who Angela assumed was his mother. "I don't want you hanging out with those hooligans anymore!" the woman was insisting.

"Yeah? Well, maybe I'd have better kids to hang out with if you'd stop treating me like a freaking baby and let me play some real sports!" Gavin shot back.

"Gavin, we've been over this a million times. I don't feel comfortable letting you play any sport where there's a risk of you getting injured!"

"He has hemophilia," Hadley explained, in response to Angela's quizzical look. "From what I understand, his parents are very restrictive about his activities, since even a small internal bleed could be life-threatening without treatment. Gavin resents this and has started acting out, hanging around with a bad crowd at school and in the neighborhood."

"I saw him vandalizing an elementary school shed the other day," Angela confessed. "Him and Antonio and some other kids."

"They've been doing a lot of that kind of thing lately," said Hadley. "Although I imagine Antonio will change his ways now, after his time as a tribesman."

They found Antonio's screen and watched as he landed in his bedroom, scowled at his thirteen-year-old reflection in the mirror, and then took out a piece of paper and a pencil and started drawing.

"Looks like Brendan had a similar idea," Hadley commented, pointing to the monitor next to Antonio's, which showed Brendan painting at an easel in what looked like a much-younger sibling's room.

"Will they be all right?" Angela wondered. "Re-adjusting to the twenty-first century after all that time, and being so much younger than they were…"

"We'll just have to hope and pray," said Hadley. "But I think they'll be fine over time. Kids are usually pretty resilient."

"What about JB?" Angela persisted. "He's not a kid."

"No, but he is a time agent." Hadley shrugged. "Time agents are used to some pretty strange things. Okay, maybe not _this_ strange, but…"

"But life's about building on what you live through," Angela filled in for him, remembering his quote from the last time they were here together.

"Exactly." Hadley smiled.

Angela thought about all the kids whose lives were being reflected on the walls around them, most of whom hadn't gone back in time yet and were just trying to enjoy their time being regular twenty-first century teenagers. "Do you have any idea when the time agency is going to start sending kids back in time again? I know you said it won't be for a while on your end, but once you figure it out, what day in my time will you be taking them from?"

"I don't know yet," Hadley told her. "But when we do, we'll make sure to alert you beforehand. So if any of the Missing disappear without a time agent notifying you in advance, call us right away. Same with if you notice anyone out of the ordinary talking to Jonah or Katherine."

Angela nodded. She wasn't sure yet whether she would come back to this cave or not, whether she would take advantage of the in-depth spying the monitors offered or whether she would just keep patrolling the neighborhoods in her car. But however she did it, she would continue to keep an eye on the Missing.

Especially Jonah and Katherine.


	25. Chapter 25

Angela wanted to go over to the Skidmores' house as soon as possible, so she could give Jonah and Katherine her phone number in case they ever needed to contact her. But by the time she returned home that night after giving Hadley a tour of Liston and stopping at a restaurant on Main Street to give him a taste of "authentic twenty-first century food," night had fallen. Angela wasn't about to be the random stranger who showed up on someone's doorstep at night and asked to speak to their kids.

She headed over the next morning instead. The Skidmore house looked empty; there were no lights on that she could see, and only one car in the driveway as opposed to the two that had been there last time. "Are Jonah and Katherine here?" Angela asked the Elucidator.

The word NO appeared on its screen.

"Where are they?" Angela asked, a little panicked. Had someone gotten to them overnight? She would never forgive herself if they had been kidnapped while she was out having a good time with Hadley.

The name of a nearby church showed up on the Elucidator's screen, and Angela breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing bad or scary going on. Jonah and Katherine were just at church on a Sunday morning with their parents.

And that, Angela realized, was perfect. It would be a lot easier and less suspicious to pull the kids aside and talk to them at church than it would be at their house.

Angela drove to the church and stepped inside quietly, so as not to disturb the service. She slipped into the back pew and scanned the congregation for Jonah and Katherine.

There they were. A few rows in front of her, sitting with their parents. As soon as the service was over, she would go talk to them.

Angela sat back and listened as the preacher spoke, and as the choir sang a hymn. She hadn't gone to church in years, mainly because being at church reminded her of her childhood, when she and her parents and her older brother and sister had gone to a big, jubilant church service every Sunday, and to her grandparents' house for Sunday dinner after that. She'd had a great childhood, and a great relationship with her family up until the day at SkyTrails.

What had happened after that, Angela knew, had been almost entirely her fault. She had told her family about what had happened, what she had seen, and at first they'd thought she was just a little stressed out from her first day on the job. But she'd persisted, and they'd started to wonder if something was actually wrong with her. She'd been more than a little upset about the fact that her own family refused to believe that she was telling the actual truth. Then, once she'd started worrying that the government was tracking her and tapping her phone, she'd virtually cut off all contact with her family for fear that someone would try to use them as bait to get to her.

Her family thought she was an absolute nutcase.

Angela was glad when the service was over. No more thinking about the family she'd lost; it was time to go talk to Jonah and Katherine.

Angela stood up and followed the throng of people out the doors in the back of the sanctuary, keeping a close eye on Katherine's blond ponytail. She was relieved when people didn't automatically start exiting the church and going to their cars. Instead, they emptied out into a large room and started talking and drinking coffee.

Jonah and Katherine's parents struck up a conversation with an elderly couple, and Jonah and Katherine stood by, looking bored.

 _Perfect._

Angela strode over until she was in their line of vision. Jonah was the first to notice her, and his face seemed to pale a little. He nudged Katherine and she followed his gaze over to where Angela was standing. Her eyes grew round and worried, and Angela felt bad for the distress she was causing them. It wasn't like she was here for any _bad_ reason.

"Hey Mom, Dad, Jonah and I are going to go find some of our friends, okay?" Katherine said, and before either of her parents had given an answer, she'd grabbed Jonah's arm and the two of them had started walking toward Angela.

"What's going on?" Jonah asked as soon as they reached her. "Is everything okay with time?"

Katherine dug her elbow into Jonah's ribs. "Shhh!" she hissed. "Other people are around!"

"Everything's fine," Angela said quickly. "I just wanted to give you guys my phone number, in case you ever need to contact me. Just in _case_ anything happens."

Both kids eyed her skeptically. "Do you _think_ something's going to happen?" asked Jonah.

"No," Angela replied, even though that wasn't technically true. She knew something would happen on November 21, and it was likely that Jonah would be involved. But he didn't need to know that yet. "I just wanted you guys to know that… I'm here if you ever want to talk." She didn't dare mention time travel with so many people around. And she didn't know how much the time agents wanted Jonah and Katherine to know, anyhow.

"Did you hear about the 1600s?" Katherine asked, and this time it was Jonah jabbing her in the ribs and shushing her.

Angela nodded. "JB told me all about what happened."

"Do you talk to JB a lot?" Katherine wanted to know.

"I've talked to him a few times since the time cave," Angela told her. "And Hadley too." She couldn't resist smiling, remembering her tour and dinner out with Hadley the night before. Neither of them had wanted the night to end.

"Did they say anything about—" Jonah began, but just then, Angela noticed Mr. and Mrs. Skidmore heading over in their direction.

"Quick," she hissed. "Let me give you my phone number, and we can talk more on the phone."

Katherine whipped a cell phone out of her pocket and handed it to Angela. Angela found _Contacts_ and typed her home phone number in. Then she gave the phone back to Katherine and both kids walked off toward their parents as if nothing had happened.

Angela watched them go with a twinge of longing, seeing how the Skidmore parents interacted with their children, as if their children were the most important thing in the world. Angela's parents had once looked at her that way. And now she hadn't even spoken to them in a decade.

 _I could call them now,_ she thought. _Or I could go back to Mayville and visit them._ The FBI seemed like such a faraway threat now, almost as if it were part of a different life. Maybe she had been a little bit paranoid to think that they would try to use her family as bait to bribe her. And she didn't need validation for her theory anymore, because she knew what had actually happened.

But she had a responsibility now. She needed to keep an eye on Jonah and Katherine. And besides, what would she actually say to her family if she talked to them— _hey, so it turns out the plane I saw appear out of thin air actually was a time-travel device being used to kidnap children from various points in history, and now I'm friends with time travelers and have actually traveled through time myself_? They'd probably just decide she was crazier than they'd originally thought.

 _I can't have my family back,_ Angela thought as she drove home. _But I can make sure that Jonah and Katherine and the other thirty-five children get to stay with_ _their_ _families—their twenty-first century families, that is._ Maybe after she had lunch, she would head back up to the time cave, just to check up on everybody and make sure they were still safe. Maybe—

Angela froze right as she reached her front door, suddenly struck by the sensation that she was being watched. She glanced over her shoulder, then over her other shoulder. No one was in sight.

The feeling didn't go away, even as she headed inside and started rummaging through her pantry, trying to decide what to eat. It wasn't until she was sitting down with a sandwich that she realized why.

Of course she felt like she was being watched. She probably _was_ being watched that very instant, by the time agency. Who knew how many times a day they peeked in on her, the same way she had been considering peeking in on the kids from the time crash?

She wouldn't go back to the cave. She would check on the kids later, but she would do it the same way she'd done it before, by driving around their neighborhoods and keeping her eyes out for anything weird. She would occasionally ask the Elucidator for updates on where certain kids were, but she wouldn't resort to actually spying on them. She didn't want to do anything that would give a thirteen-year-old kid the same sense of uneasiness she was feeling right now.

But what if that sense of uneasiness was the price they would have to pay for their safety?


	26. Chapter 26

The next several days passed by in a blur. Angela continued making her rounds through the neighborhoods, using the Elucidator to periodically check where Jonah and Katherine were, and—a couple times—having phone conversations with Hadley. Well, Elucidator conversations, anyway. The time agency was no closer to gaining a better understanding of time travel than they'd been before, and they were strictly forbidden to travel into the future—the "future" meaning any time beyond the time Hadley and JB came from—to talk to people who might be able to help them. Elucidators didn't even allow it. "Too much potential for paradoxes," Hadley explained.

JB came to visit Angela the next Saturday. "How's it going, re-adjusting to your native time period?" Angela asked him.

JB pursed his lips in a thoughtful way. "It's… interesting," he told her. "There were a lot of things I took for granted before—being able to communicate with anyone I wanted whenever I felt like it, having dozens of choices of what to eat for dinner on any given night, having just about any piece of information at my fingertips whenever I needed it… living in the 1600s really helped me appreciate the kind of stuff that's always available in my native time period. Now that I have all that stuff back, I feel kind of… spoiled."

He looked down at his fingers for a moment, then cleared his throat. "Anyway, it is a relief to be back. And we've been _so_ busy lately, trying to figure out how we can avoid the kinds of things that happened during that last mission."

"Hadley said you guys hadn't gotten any closer to figuring anything out," Angela said sympathetically.

JB shook his head dejectedly. "And we probably won't for a long time. I just hope the barriers we set up to contain the ripples don't break while we're still trying to figure out what to do."

In an effort to cheer him up, Angela said, "I heard you found a place for all the natives to live."

"Oh—yes! They're living in a special nature preserve in my time period. I've visited them a few times, and they're happy." He smiled. "And I was able to get Andrea's grandfather, John White, into a nursing home right here in your time period. Andrea's been visiting him every day."

Angela was glad that had worked out. "And Brendan and Antonio?"

JB shrugged. "They're coping the best they can. I actually was just visiting them, and Andrea, before I came here. I'm on my way to check in with Jonah and Katherine next. I haven't told them anything yet about our temporary ban on time travel or how things stand with Second."

"How do things stand with Second?" Angela asked, because come to think of it, JB and Hadley had never actually told her what had happened to him after he split time.

"Well, as far as we know, he's living in his other dimension, where no one will ever be able to catch him," said JB. "He said—in the recording he left in the time hollow, that is—that he wasn't going to meddle with our dimension anymore. Of course, he doesn't exactly have the best track record for telling the truth." He scowled.

"And that other dimension—it doesn't have anything to do with our dimension, right?" Angela asked. "It's completely separate?"

JB's face took on a worried look. "We _think_ so. But this is so new to all of us, we can't be totally sure. We've been combing through history to make sure nothing's changed in our dimension as a result of the time split, and we haven't found anything yet, but that doesn't mean there's nothing there." He looked down at his Elucidator. "I don't mean to be rude, but it looks like Jonah and Katherine are both outside now, so I'm going to head over and talk to them. I'd rather not have to try to explain who I am to their parents."

Angela nodded, remembering how she'd had the same thoughts when she'd gone to talk with them the past Sunday.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, as did the next day, and the next. Angela continued with her usual business, trying not to think about how each day that passed brought her closer to the twenty-first of November. The day she would go back to 1932 on a rescue mission, not mentioning her Elucidator to JB and whoever else she would be with.

It was a little weird that she'd been instructed to not mention the Elucidator to JB. Wouldn't JB already know she had it, since he was the one who'd given it to her?

Angela was still thinking about her impending mission when the Elucidator rang around eleven on Tuesday morning. Seeing that it was Hadley, Angela answered eagerly. "How's everything going?"

"The same," Hadley answered. "No new headway on our understanding of time travel, but no new problems with the past either."

Angela was glad to hear that. "Everything's been fine here too," she told him. "Sometimes I ask the Elucidator to give me updates on where the kids are, and they're always in perfectly normal places. And I've been using that screen trick you taught me too, where I can ask it to show me what a certain kid is doing at a certain point in time." It was kind of like the monitors in the time cave, except that Angela didn't have to be in a certain location to access the feature, and she couldn't view all the kids at once. It was easier and more practical than driving past everyone's house, but it somehow didn't feel as intrusive as watching the kids through giant monitors.

"Good," said Hadley encouragingly. "So… the reason I'm calling is, I'm on lunch break right now, and I was wondering, if you're interested, if you'd mind showing me another twenty-first century restaurant. I could pay, of course."

Angela suddenly felt giddy with excitement. Was Hadley asking her out on a date? It was crazy. Hadley was from the _future_. Probably hundreds of years ahead of Angela's time. There were a million logistical reasons why a relationship with Hadley would never work.

But Angela wasn't about to say no to a date with Hadley.

"I'd love to!" she exclaimed.

They went to the Liston Diner, a place decorated fifties-style, with giant records on the wall and waitresses wearing long puffy skirts. "I'm not sure how representative this is of the twenty-first century," Angela told Hadley, "But they serve good food!"

They talked about normal things while they waited for their meals. What their favorite foods were, what styles of music they liked (it was very funny to hear Hadley calling what Angela considered modern music "oldies"), fun things they'd done in their childhoods. Angela learned that Hadley was eight years older than her, had three brothers, and had once broken his arm trying to follow his oldest brother down a steep hill on a "I'll just call it a bike."

The meals arrived, and they had just started eating when Hadley suddenly held up his finger. "Excuse me for a moment, I'm getting a call from the agency."

He turned his face toward the window and started talking softly, as if he were using some sort of Bluetooth microphone, although Angela couldn't see any microphone. It was probably embedded in his ear or something like that.

"In 2012… with Angela… why, do you need me?" he was saying. He was silent for a moment, and then his face grew pale. " _What?_ Are you sure? No… no… yes, of course I'll be there as soon as I can… I'll leave immediately. And Angela?...okay. Okay, bye."

He turned back to look at Angela, and his face was taut with worry. "A new crisis has come up in the past," he told her. "I have to go immediately."


	27. Chapter 27

"The _past_?" Angela repeated, remembering what Hadley had already told her about banning time travel before the twenty-first century. "I thought you guys weren't going on any more missions to the past until you'd figured out how to make time travel safer!"

"In this case, it wouldn't be safe for me _not_ to go," said Hadley grimly. "What we've been looking for, what we've been worried about since Second split time… the time agency hit upon something major, and we have to fix it now or…" He didn't finish his sentence. "I'm sorry to cut our lunch short, but this is crucial. I need you to go find Jonah and Katherine _now._ I'm sorry I don't have more time to explain." Hadley threw some money down on the table and hurried off to the men's restroom, undoubtedly to disappear without being seen.

It took a couple seconds before Angela's brain kicked into action. Something was wrong with time. Hadley was leaving for the past. He had told her to go find Jonah and Katherine.

Ignoring strange looks from the people around her, Angela hurried out of the diner and to her car. The dashboard clock said it was 11:36. Since it was a Tuesday, that meant Jonah and Katherine would be at school. _How am I going to get them out of school?_ Angela wondered as she shifted her car into Drive and tore out of the parking lot. It wasn't like she could just go in and dismiss them. The school would want to see some form of ID, make sure she was on the list of people authorized to pick them up. And of course she wasn't, because Jonah and Katherine's parents didn't even know her.

She did have the Elucidator. Maybe she could turn herself invisible and just sneak into the school, and then have the Elucidator tell her which classrooms to find them in. Jonah and Katherine would be able to see her, since they'd traveled through time, but nobody else would…

But how would she have an opportunity to talk to them? Just because she'd be invisible didn't mean she'd be inaudible. And school doors were usually locked during the day anyway, so the sneaking in thing probably wouldn't even work out.

 _I could say… that there's some lunatic on the loose who wants to kidnap Katherine and Jonah, and I tried to get ahold of their parents at work but wasn't able to, so I have to pick them up and bring them to safety._

Ridiculous. If that really were the case, the kids would be a thousand times safer at school. The school secretary would probably just think _Angela_ was trying to kidnap them.

 _So maybe… I could say I'm their neighbor, and there's been a family emergency, and their parents told me to pick the kids up and bring them to meet their parents at the hospital?_

She didn't think the school would fall for that either.

Angela raced down the highway, praying she'd get to Jonah and Katherine before someone else did. She wasn't even sure _who_ else was after Jonah and Katherine, or even if anybody was, but Hadley had acted like it was really important for her to get to them as soon as possible.

She pulled off the exit ramp and drove in the direction of Harris Middle School. She glanced at the clock again. 11:43. It had only taken her seven minutes to get to this point, but she still had a few blocks to go…

And then suddenly, without warning, her car stopped. As firmly and completely as if Angela had just slammed on the brake. Angela lurched forward, her seatbelt only barely preventing her from hitting the steering wheel. Then she was thrust back again, the equal and opposite reaction of being thrown forward.

Her foot had been on the gas, not the brake. What had just happened?

Angela nudged the gas pedal with her foot. Absolutely nothing happened. She pressed down harder, and harder, and still nothing happened. The car didn't even make the kind of revving noise it had made one time when she'd accidentally tried to drive while still in Park.

She checked the shifter. _Was_ she in Park, or Neutral, or something?

No, she was still in Drive.

She hit the brake pedal, wondering if some crazy thing had happened with the vehicle that had switched the functions of the gas and brake. Nothing changed. She checked the emergency brake, just to make sure she hadn't accidentally pulled it while driving. Nope. It was disengaged.

The dashboard was still lit up, exactly the same as it had been while the car was running. Her gas tank read three-quarters full. Nothing about the car seemed out of the ordinary.

Except for the fact that it was stubbornly refusing to move.

Angela made a frustrated sound. This was the exact _wrong_ time to be having vehicle problems. Maybe the issue was outside the car. Maybe something had fallen out, or the tires had popped, or something. Maybe she should just ditch her car and get out and run the rest of the way to the school—even though it was still over a mile away.

Angela was just getting out of the car—whether to check the outside of it for problems or run to the school, she wasn't sure—when she noticed something that made her heart catch in her throat.

 _Nothing_ outside was moving. The trees were perfectly, utterly still. An elderly man in the nearest front yard was bent over a rosebush with clippers, but he wasn't clipping. He wasn't doing anything at all. Stranger still, a squirrel was suspended in midair, frozen in the act of jumping from one tree to another.

It looked like time had completely stopped.


	28. Chapter 28

Angela yanked the Elucidator out of her pocket. "Call Hadley!" she demanded. If anything was a time emergency, this was.

Words appeared on the Elucidator's screen. CALL FAILED. HADLEY CORREO IS UNAVAILABLE.

Of course. Hadley was busy dealing with the crisis that had come up in the past. "Then call JB!" she yelled.

CALL FAILED. JB IS UNAVAILABLE.

JB was probably busy with the same problem Hadley was working on. Angela willed herself not to freak out. There were still plenty of other time agents she could contact.

"Call Kylin Correo," she said, trying to keep her voice under control.

CALL FAILED. KYLIN CORREO IS UNAVAILABLE.

Angela held back a scream of frustration. "Okay, then call Shen! Call Marrison! Call Ariti!"

UNAVAILABLE.

UNAVAILABLE.

UNAVAILABLE.

Angela had one shot left, and she really didn't want to use it. But what other choice did she have? "Call Tida Berkel," she muttered. Tida would probably be mean and snooty and condescending, but at least she'd have a better understanding than Angela did about what was going on.

CALL FAILED. TIDA BERKEL IS UNAVAILABLE.

"Can you put me in touch with _anyone_ from the time agency?" Angela asked pleadingly.

NOT RIGHT NOW. MAJOR TIME DISTURBANCES HAVE TEMPORARILY DISRUPTED MY ABILITY TO FACILITATE TRANSCHRONIC COMMUNICATION.

Angela's eyes latched onto the word _temporarily._ "How long until that, uh, ability is back up?" she asked.

I CANNOT DETERMINE THAT.

Angela threw her arms in the air in frustration. Here she was, in the middle of the biggest time emergency she'd ever experienced, and she couldn't get in touch with any time agents to let them know what was going on. Of course, it was possible that they already knew what was going on, and maybe that was why Hadley had needed to rush off so quickly to the past. Maybe he'd been trying to prevent _this._

But he hadn't been able to prevent it, and that made it even more important for Angela to get to Jonah and Katherine. Although, would Jonah and Katherine be able to move, like Angela, or would they be frozen in place, like the man and the squirrel?

"Are Jonah and Katherine frozen?" she asked the Elucidator. "Why am I not frozen, when everything around me is?"

YOU AND JONAH AND KATHERINE ARE NOT FROZEN BECAUSE YOU HAVE ALL TRAVELED THROUGH TIME.

Oh. That was actually a good thing. Angela could now go to the school and find Jonah and Katherine without anyone else noticing.

Of course, who knew what would happen in the time it took for her to run all the way there?

"Elucidator, is there any way you can make my car be able to move again?" she asked.

To her relief, the Elucidator flashed the word YES, and a thin black cable snaked its way out of the part of the Elucidator that, on an ordinary phone, would have been the charging port. PLUG THIS CABLE IN TO YOUR CAR AS IF YOU ARE CHARGING A CELL PHONE, the screen read.

As soon as Angela had plugged it in, the car's engine roared back to life. Angela pressed the gas pedal down hard, wanting to get to the school as quickly as possible. But the car didn't go as fast as she wanted it to. Even with the pedal completely flat on the floor, it barely reached twenty-five miles an hour.

Angela didn't even bother asking the Elucidator if it could let her go faster. The very feel of moving forward in the car felt unnatural, as if every molecule of air was pushing back against Angela and the car and everything in it.

 _Of course,_ thought Angela. _Think of all the laws of physics the Elucidator has to defy in order to get this car to move in the first place._

She continued struggling toward the school, dodging cars that were stopped right in the middle of the road, their passengers completely immobile inside. And then, just as she was driving down Library Lane, the last remaining street before the school's neighborhood, she saw them. Jonah and Katherine, walking in her direction.

Angela was still a good twenty-five feet away, but as she watched, Jonah threw himself into the ditch on the side of the road. Katherine remained in the middle of the street, her hands on her hips, watching as Angela drew nearer.

Angela drove until she was right next to Katherine, then braked.

Katherine glanced over into the ditch, to where Jonah was crouching, looking wide-eyed and alarmed. Angela felt bad that she'd frightened him, but at the same time, he had looked kind of funny, diving into the ditch to avoid being hit by her slow-moving car.

"Hi, Angela," said Jonah, standing up and brushing his shirt off. "I couldn't see who was driving. And it looked like you were coming right toward us. I guess my perspective was a little off…"

"No worries. Better safe than sorry," said Angela, trying not to laugh.

"Wait," said Jonah. "How'd you get a car to work in stopped time, when I couldn't even make a phone call?"

Angela showed him and Katherine the Elucidator. "JB gave you your own Elucidator?" Katherine exclaimed.

"Only so I could watch out for the two of you," Angela told her. "Only to be used in case of emergency. Like now."

Katherine started bouncing up and down impatiently. "So call him already! Make him tell you what's going on!"

"He's vanished. Him and Hadley and every other time agent I could think of to call," Angela explained, remembering all the UNAVAILABLE messages the Elucidator had given her. "Last I heard Hadley was dealing with some new crisis in the past," she added. "But I don't know where any of them went."

Jonah frowned. "They weren't going to make any more trips to the past. Not until it was safe."

Angela couldn't help it. She felt her eyes start to fill with tears. "Hadley said it wasn't safe for them _not_ to go," she said thickly.

What if it wasn't safe either way? What if going was just slightly safer than not going, but either way would still end in disaster?

Would Angela ever see Hadley again? Would time remain frozen like this forever?

She saw Jonah grimace. She needed to keep her emotions under control. She didn't want to scare the kids.

"Hey, hey, I'm sure Hadley and JB and the others will have everything under control soon," she said soothingly, even though she wasn't sure at all.

Katherine was still impatient. "Can we talk about all this on our way to Chip's house?" she asked, already opening the passenger side door. "Come _on,_ Jonah, get in the car."

Chip's house. That idea at least made sense. Chip was another missing kid from history, and he lived nearby. Now that Angela knew Jonah and Katherine were safe, she should probably start checking on the other missing kids—starting with Chip.

Angela reached over and unlocked the back door. She, Jonah, and Katherine were already in the car and on their way before Angela stopped to wonder why they were heading to Chip's _house_ , rather than back to the school.

She didn't have time to ask. She was too busy pressing the gas pedal down as hard as she could, trying to get the needle on the speedometer to pass the 25 mark.

"I don't think you need to worry about obeying speed limits right now," Jonah commented from the backseat.

Still pressing hard on the gas, Angela explained that the Elucidator was probably defying several laws of physics just to get the car to move at all.

"You drove like this all the way from your house?" asked Jonah.

"Only the last mile or so was in stopped time," Angela clarified. "I was already on my way here. Hadley told me to come find you two when he left for the past." She clenched her teeth, trying not to start crying again at the thought of Hadley facing unknown dangers in some unfamiliar time period. She was glad when Katherine spoke up.

"What—were you going to show up at school and pretend to be our long-lost aunt or something?"

"I was still figuring out a good story. I don't think the 'aunt' thing would work very well," said Angela, with a glance at Katherine and Jonah's light skin and light hair, and her own dark skin and black hair.

"White kids can have African-American aunts! It happens all the time!" Katherine exclaimed indignantly.

Angela shrugged. "Yeah, but it doesn't help the story."

"Hold on," said Jonah suddenly. "You said Hadley and JB wanted you to watch over me and Katherine. Why us? Why not Chip or Andrea or any of the other missing children from history? Or—is someone else watching over them?"

Angela remembered the reasons JB had given her. "You and Katherine have traveled through time a lot more than any of the other kids. You've had the most contact with JB. That puts you in the most…" she stopped, realizing that the truth would probably make them even more scared than they already were. "Oh, you know how those time agents are," she said, going for a teasing tone of voice. "They're always so concerned about being logical and fair, and keeping things balanced and equal. But you _know_ you're their favorites."

She could already tell that both kids were going to keep asking questions, and she _really_ didn't want them to know about how much danger they were in of being kidnapped by unethical time travelers. She needed to distract them. "Do I turn here to get to Chip's, or is it the next street?" she asked, even though she knew perfectly well how to get to Chip's house.

"Um… here," said Jonah. "But you didn't—"

"Okay, I'm going to need some directions from you guys, because I'm not exactly sure where I'm going… when do I have to turn again?"

"After the blue house," said Katherine. "But did JB—"

"Which blue house?" Angela interrupted. "The light blue one on the corner, or that turquoise one down toward the end of the street?"

"Light blue," Jonah said quickly. "When JB said you should watch over us, did he mean—"

"What?" Angela swerved up on the sidewalk, narrowly avoiding a car that had been frozen in such a way to block almost the entire street. "Sorry, Jonah, I've really got to concentrate on driving. This is like something from a car-chase movie, where you have to keep going from lane to lane."

This was true, and it deterred Jonah and Katherine from asking questions for a little bit. Then, as they turned onto Chip's street, Katherine started to ask, "So why does traveling through time the most and talking to JB the most put us—"

"Is Chip's house five or six houses down from yours?" Angela interrupted quickly. She didn't need an answer. She pulled right up to the front of Chip's house, and Katherine immediately jumped out of the car and started running up toward his front door.

"No—wait!" called Angela. "Maybe I should go first—" What if there was some other time traveler lurking inside Chip's house? What if it was Gary or Hodge? What if this whole emergency had started from Gary and Hodge breaking out of time prison?

Katherine didn't stop. Angela hurried to catch up. She thought she heard Jonah yell something after her, but she was too focused on trying to get to Chip's front door before Katherine that she didn't hear what he said.

Katherine charged up the front steps and rang the doorbell. Angela caught up to her and waited on the doorstep with her. "How do you know Chip's even home?" she asked, catching her breath. "Shouldn't he be at school?"

"He got dismissed early today," Katherine answered. "He wasn't feeling well. Jonah and I don't know if he's actually _sick_ sick, or if he's… you know. Having panic attacks about being in the Middle Ages."

Angela remembered that Chip had lived two years in the past as a medieval king.

"I imagine it's really hard for him to readjust to the twenty-first century," she said sympathetically.

"Yeah," Katherine agreed. "And his parents _don't_ help the matter at _all_ , since they're mean and all they do is yell at him… grrr, what's taking him so long?" She started pounding on the door with her fists. "Chip! Chip!"

"Shh!" a voice came from behind Angela, and she whirled around to see Jonah right at the bottom of the front steps, holding the Elucidator. "JB's talking on the Elucidator!"

Angela listened hard. The Elucidator sounded static-y, like a cell phone that was almost out of range. But it was definitely JB's voice coming through. "…was afraid that… but you haven't seen anything strange?..."

Jonah stared incredulously at the Elucidator. "Strange? JB, time's stopped!"

There was a pause, and then JB was wailing loudly, "Stopped? No! It can't be! Your time is stopped? The twenty-first century?"

Jonah started climbing the stairs, and Angela put her hand on his shoulder to steady him, since he looked like he might fall over. "Hey, we're still okay," Jonah was saying into the Elucidator. "Angela came and got me and Katherine, and now we're at Chip's house, and—"

"Chip's house?" JB interrupted. "No! Stay away from Chip! Run! Run away!"

At that moment, Chip finally came to the door. He looked sick and miserable. Angela reached up her wrist to check the temperature of his forehead. At the same moment, Katherine leaned in to touch Chip's hand, and Jonah grabbed Katherine's arm. Then, instantly, both Jonah and Katherine jerked back. "No!" screamed Katherine. "We'll fall!"

Angela stared at her. "Katherine, what are you talking about?"

Katherine didn't answer, and Jonah was already jumping down the steps. "Jonah, where'd you put the Elucidator?" Angela asked, because it didn't look like he was holding it anymore. "What were you saying about JB talking on it?"

JB _had_ just been talking on it. And he'd been telling Jonah to run away from Chip's house. Was that why Jonah was moving so quickly toward the car? _Were_ Gary and Hodge inside Chip's house, waiting to grab Jonah and Katherine? Was Chip in danger too, or was he just the bait?

"No time to explain," Jonah called up to Angela. "You've got to get us back to school right now!"

Back to school? "But what about—" Angela broke off. Jonah looked different from how he'd looked just a moment ago. His hair was slightly longer and messier, and his clothing was covered in grass and dirt stains.

Angela looked at Katherine. She looked different too. Her T-shirt, which had been covered in glittery lettering before, was no longer glittery. There was a small hole in her jeans. Her hair was slightly longer as well.

Angela realized what must have happened. In all her efforts to protect Jonah and Katherine, something had gone wrong. Maybe it was because they'd been near Chip's house, maybe it had happened for a different reason. Maybe it had been completely random. But there was no denying the obvious.

"You two have been in another time, haven't you?"


	29. Chapter 29

Neither Jonah nor Katherine answered. Jonah kept running toward the car. Katherine, on the other hand, ran into Chip's house and started leaning toward him, the palm of her hand cradling his face. "I just have to make sure Chip's okay first!" she yelled, in answer to Jonah's protests. "You didn't have another panic attack about being back in the Middle Ages, did you, Chip?"

Jonah bounded back up the stairs. "Katherine! Nobody wants to watch you two kiss!"

"And—I've got the stomach flu. Really, that's all it is," said Chip, stepping back and separating himself from Katherine. "But I don't want you to catch it."

"I am not watching anyone else puke!" Jonah exclaimed, grabbing Katherine's arm. "Come on!"

 _Anyone_ _else_ _?_ thought Angela. Was Jonah referring to something that had happened at school or at home… or something that had happened on whatever time travel journey he and Katherine had just gotten back from?

She didn't have time to ask. Jonah had grabbed her arm as well, and she ran to keep up with him and Katherine as they raced to the car.

"You _will_ tell me the whole story later on," Angela insisted as she searched the dashboard for the Elucidator. Remembering that Jonah had been the last to have it, she turned around and looked at his hands, but they were both empty. "Wait—where's the Elucidator to make this go?"

Instead of reaching into his pocket and pulling out the Elucidator—that _was_ where Angela's Elucidator was, right?—Jonah reached over and turned the key in the ignition. The car started up as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened. "We don't need the Elucidator for that anymore. We're back in regular time," he said.

Angela stared at him in horror. If time had started up again, and Jonah and Katherine were still here rather than in their classrooms where they'd undoubtedly been before time had frozen… that meant that, to the perspective of their classmates and teachers, Jonah and Katherine had just vanished into thin air.

"I'll get you back to school immediately," Angela told them, shifting her car into gear and speeding out of the driveway.

 _This won't be like when I saw the plane,_ she told herself. _None of the kids or teachers at Jonah and Katherine's school will decide to devote their lives to figuring out what could possibly make someone disappear. Jonah and Katherine will be back at school in a couple minutes, and they'll be able to explain it away. Say they just moved so fast that no one saw them. This_ _won't_ _mess up time._

But what if time was already so messed up it wouldn't matter?

Angela had the pedal down almost as far as it had been when the Elucidator was powering the car, only this time the car was going much faster. She made it to the front entrance of the school in mere minutes and slammed on the brake.

Jonah and Katherine didn't immediately get out of the car. "You'll have to come in with us, to sign us in. We'll have to think of some good excuse," said Katherine, her face tormented. "They've rigged the front doors so no one can get in the building without walking through the office first."

Jonah shook his head. "Katherine, we can't go through the front. There's that security camera right there—we can't leave a record that we were outside of school."

Suddenly, he pushed Katherine's head down below the level of the window, ducking his own head down as well. Angela looked up and saw a silhouette inside the front door, no doubt some administrator on the lookout for kids who were skipping school.

Katherine was whispering to Jonah in the backseat. Angela couldn't hear everything she said. Then Jonah looked up at Angela. "Drive on around to the side door," he said.

"It's going to be locked, and we'll just waste even more time—" Katherine began, but Jonah cut her off.

"That's where the cook and the janitor were kissing, remember? What do you bet they have the door propped open?"

Angela sped around the corner, just as the door Jonah and Katherine had been talking about started swinging shut. "Run!" Jonah shouted to Katherine, pushing her out the car door. "Angela—"

Angela desperately wanted an explanation, but there was no time. "I know—later," she said. "Now, go!"

She watched as the two kids made it to the door barely on time to catch it before it locked shut. They stood, catching their breath, and then went inside.

Angela had just a moment to catch her own breath before she felt herself falling through time.


	30. Chapter 30

The instant Angela landed, she heard someone repeating her name over and over. "Angela. Angela! _Angela!_ "

The voice was sharp, urgent. She looked up and saw JB.

"JB!" she exclaimed. "Time was frozen—Jonah and Katherine—they went back in time—"

"I know," JB said tensely. "And now we need to bring them back here. Something came up."

"Where did they _go?_ " Angela asked. "They didn't have time to tell me anything! And why was time stopped?"

"Jonah and Katherine were randomly pulled back to 1903 the moment all four of you were touching," JB explained, swiping his fingers back and forth across screens and screens of information on the wall. It looked like they were in a time hollow. "We don't understand exactly how it works, but whenever four time travelers are linked in stopped time, the results are unpredictable. That's why I wanted you to stay away from Chip's house."

"So it had nothing to do with Gary and Hodge?" Angela checked, just to make sure.

"Gary and Hodge?" JB was momentarily distracted from his screens. "No, of course not. It had to do with Mileva Einstein."

" _Mileva_ Einstein?" The only Einstein Angela had ever heard of was Albert.

"Albert Einstein's wife," JB expounded quickly, now typing something on what looked like a keyboard suspended in midair. "What started all of this was an alert at the time agency that Albert Einstein was thinking about the wrong things. He'd somehow figured out about the time split in 1611, and was working on formulas to discover more about that rather than laying the foundation for everything he was supposed to become famous for. I came to this time hollow to study where things went wrong, to try to figure out how to fix things… and then I got stuck here."

"Stuck?" Angela repeated. "What do you mean, stuck?"

"I mean, when I tried to get back to the time agency, I couldn't. And then my Elucidator and chair and monitors kept flickering in and out of existence, and I was having a hard time reaching everyone I tried to call, and… it really seemed like all of time was about to end." He typed a final command into the keyboard and the screen projected on the wall in front of him shut off.

Angela shuddered. "It looks like things are okay now, though," she said, looking around the room.

"I ended up having to send Einstein's daughter back in time," JB said, his words rushed, his face too worried for everything to be okay. "It was a last resort. The only thing I could think of that might stabilize time enough to at least calm things down a little."

"Einstein had a daughter? And she was one of the missing kids from history?"

JB nodded. "Even though I wasn't able to leave this time hollow, I was able to remotely pull the girl—her twenty-first century name is Emily—out of time and have her meet me here. I told her what was going on and she agreed to do her part. So I sent her back, and all I could do was watch as she joined with her tracer, as she grew sicker and sicker and her mother took care of her, as her mother telegrammed Albert to see if he would come be with his daughter… and then as her mother discovered Jonah and Katherine."

Angela didn't have to ask to know that was a bad thing.

"Mileva was a clever woman," JB continued with a grimace. "She figured out how to use the Elucidator and… essentially, what ended up happening was she, Jonah, Katherine, and Emily all ended up here. And the moment they arrived, I became frozen in my seat, able to hear and see but not able to move a muscle."

Angela frowned. "That doesn't make sense. You're a time traveler. And—can time even freeze in a time hollow?"

"As we found out from Second's escapades, all the normal rules of time travel are up in the air when time is on the verge of catastrophe." JB was now fiddling with an Elucidator. "I was the only one frozen, until Hadley randomly appeared. We'd had him stationed slightly earlier on in Albert's life, trying to prevent Albert from theorizing the time split in the first place. But before he got a chance to do anything in that time period, he ended up here, as frozen as I was."

"But he's okay?" Angela combed the room with her eyes, making sure she hadn't missed seeing Hadley.

"He's fine. I sent him to retrieve Emily, and you and I are going to go retrieve Jonah and Katherine."

"But—wait! _Why_ are we retrieving them? They acted like it was really important for them to get back to school!"

"It was. When time started up again, they needed to get back before anyone noticed they were gone." JB looked up from the Elucidator. "While Mileva Einstein was in this time hollow, she used the Elucidator to watch what would happen during the entire rest of her life. And the rest of Albert's life. And Emily's entire life in the twenty-first century, up until that point. And then she came up with a plan to fix time and get Albert thinking about the right things."

"Well… that's good, isn't it?" Angela asked, puzzled.

"It was good," JB admitted grudgingly. "And it probably would have worked perfectly if Jonah hadn't decided to _leave the Elucidator with her_ when she went back to her life in 1903."

It suddenly made sense why Jonah hadn't been holding the Elucidator when they'd rushed from Chip's house to the school.

JB continued, scowling. "Once Jonah got back and told me what he'd done, Hadley and I started scanning the charts to see how much of a mess Mileva had made, having an Elucidator of her own to do whatever she pleased. We didn't find traces of any changes in time, which means that she covered her tracks extremely well."

"Couldn't it also mean that she didn't use the Elucidator at all?" Angela suggested.

"Oh, she used it," JB said grimly. "We just don't know yet for what. But we think the instance of stopped time was caused by Mileva entering your native time period. Or that she intentionally froze time so she could get in and out without being seen." He turned the screen of his Elucidator so that Angela could see it too. At first, Angela thought it was just a picture, because nothing on the screen was moving. It looked like an average middle-school classroom, with students taking notes and daydreaming and whispering to their friends and—in one girl's case—texting.

Then an old, stooped woman with grizzled gray hair appeared in the frame, right next to an empty seat. She placed something that looked like a cell phone on the seat, angled it ever so precisely, and then disappeared.

Then everyone in the classroom started moving again, and Angela could hear a male voice from the front of the room intoning about how he'd dropped his marker and wasn't that a perfect example of the concept he'd just been teaching about. Then the bell rang, and all the students stood up and started stampeding out of the classroom.

The teacher walked into the frame. He was an old man, although not nearly as old as the woman who'd appeared and disappeared while time was frozen. He started strolling up and down the rows of desks, straightening the crooked ones and picking up random pieces of paper off the floor as he went. Then he got to the seat where the woman had placed the object. He picked it up, examined it, and then headed out the door of the classroom into a hallway crowded with kids. The camera followed him until he reached a student.

Angela squinted at the screen. It wasn't just any student—it was Jonah. The teacher talked with Jonah for a minute and then handed him the object he'd picked up from the seat.

"Oh! That's the Elucidator, isn't it?" Angela realized as she watched Jonah go behind a row of lockers and start prodding at the object. "Mileva gave it back to him!"

JB paused the image. "Yes. And now that we have it back, we need to gather everyone involved and watch exactly what it was used for while it was in Mileva's possession."

"I thought you already did that," said Angela.

"We looked for blips on the charts that would alert us to changes," JB clarified. "That's not the same as what we can do with the actual Elucidator. All Elucidators keep a lifetime record of where and when they've been and what's happened around them, so we'll be able to go backward from the scene we just saw, to wherever Mileva was before she went to the twenty-first century." JB had gone back to typing on the Elucidator he had in his hands. "We only have Hadley's Elucidator with us right now, since mine never reappeared after the last time it vanished, and Jonah has yours. But I'm setting remote controls to pull you and Katherine back to this time hollow as soon as you grab onto her arm. Just make sure nobody's watching when you two disappear… looks like Katherine's about to walk past an empty classroom, so I'll put you in there and you can go out and meet her."

Angela opened her mouth to protest, _But what about timesickness? What if I can't even stand up until Katherine's all the way down the hall, and I lose sight of her?_ But before she could say anything, she was whizzing through time.

She felt the timesickness as soon as she landed. It wasn't too bad this time, though—maybe her body was getting used to traveling through time. Angela only had to blink a couple times before her vision swung into focus, and it felt like only a few seconds before she was able to get up off the floor and start staggering toward the door. By the time she reached the door, she was walking normally.

She peered out at the sea of students streaming by, talking and laughing and yelling down the hall to their friends. She couldn't see Katherine. Did that mean Katherine had already passed by, during the few seconds Angela was lying on the floor?

"I'm serious! I was right there in the library with you guys the whole time!" Angela jerked her head in the direction of the voice she recognized as Katherine's. Oh, good. Katherine was still a few feet from Angela's doorway, walking in her direction, talking to a girl with wavy red hair. The girl was giving Katherine a skeptical look.

"Casey, when's the last time you've had your eyes checked?" Katherine was asking the girl, frowning as if she were really worried about her friend. "'Cause I really think there's something wrong with your vision, if you didn't see me standing practically right in front of you when the period ended. Toby, you saw me, right?" she demanded, turning her head to face the boy on her other side.

He shrugged. "I wasn't paying attention. I was watching Kyle and Mark mess around with the computers."

Katherine looked like she was about to start interrogating the other kids around her, and Angela didn't have time to wait and let her chat. She stepped out of the classroom right as Katherine and her friends were walking by. "Katherine Skidmore?" she said, trying to sound like a teacher who knew who Katherine was but didn't know her very well. She hoped the school had enough teachers that the students didn't know every single one, so Katherine's friends wouldn't say, _Hey, who are you? You don't belong here!_

Katherine's eyes bugged out when she saw Angela. "Uh, just a minute," she told her friends. "You guys go on without me."

"We can wait," said the girl with the red hair.

Katherine shook her head. "Mrs., um, DuPre needs to fill me in about… the work my boyfriend's missing today while he's sick," she lied. "I'll catch up with you." She scurried into the classroom with Angela.

"Nice cover story," Angela remarked.

"What's going on?" Katherine asked hurriedly. "I really need to get back to my friends; I don't know how many of them saw me disappear at the end of last period…"

"JB wants me to take you back to the time hollow," Angela explained, just as quickly. "I'm sure we'll be able to make it so no time at all has passed for your friends when you get back here." She grabbed Katherine's arm, and that motion sent the two of them speeding off through time.

"JB's always so worried about not messing up time, you'd think he'd want me to at least make sure my friends aren't suspicious," Katherine grouched. The moment they arrived, she started voicing her protests to JB.

But JB wasn't paying attention. He was glowering at everyone in the room—Katherine, Angela, Jonah, Hadley— _yay! Hadley's back! He's okay!_ —and Emily, the kind girl who'd helped Angela back in the time cave. "I thought we should all watch this together," he said, his teeth clenched. "Immediately."

Six chairs randomly appeared in front of them, all facing the same blank wall. Evidently this was not the same kind of random appearing and disappearing that had worried JB before, because neither JB nor Hadley seemed perturbed by their appearance. Instead, both men sat down, and Angela and the three children sat down as well.

An image showed up on the wall they were facing, so lifelike it was as if they weren't looking at an image at all, but through a crystal clear window into another room. Hadley looked down at his Elucidator and read the date. "April 18, 1955. The night Albert Einstein dies."


	31. Chapter 31

Angela remembered what JB had said about the Elucidator keeping record of all its trips through time, and about watching the trips backward to see where Mileva had gone. Albert Einstein's deathbed must have been the last place Mileva had visited before returning the Elucidator to Jonah.

JB was explaining about how Albert had had family and friends with him all day, but now everyone was gone, even the nurse, who had slipped out to use the restroom. Angela watched Albert's wizened face, contorted miserably as he thrashed his head back and forth.

"Is he in pain?" she asked. "Or just having a bad dream?"

The words were barely out of her mouth before the ancient lady Angela had seen place the Elucidator in Jonah's classroom appeared at Albert's bedside.

Emily squinted. "Is that Mileva?" she asked, sounding stunned. "But I thought, when we watched their lives play out before—didn't she die years before him?"

"Yes," JB answered tensely.

Mileva touched Albert's shoulder and whispered his name. Albert startled awake and started moaning about Mileva being a ghost. But Mileva only laughed. "Oh, Albert, here you are the most famous scientist in the world, but you think of ghosts before you think of the scientific explanation. I'll give you a hint—your work provided the first steps toward it being possible for me to be here talking to you nearly seven years after you got the news of my death. Think about it."

Albert seemed to be struggling to breathe, but he managed to choke out the words, "Time… travel. You…figured out… time travel just so… you could tell me on my deathbed…what a thoroughly lousy husband I was."

Mileva shook her head and explained that that wasn't the reason she was there. She herself was due to die in her own time in the matter of a few days, but first she needed to tell him that she forgave him for everything.

Jonah, who'd been silent and withdrawn since arriving in the time hollow, perked up. "Well! Isn't this a good thing Mileva is doing? Using the Elucidator for forgiveness? Giving Albert a chance to apologize before he dies?"

"She didn't come all this way just to offer forgiveness. She's not leaving yet, is she?" muttered JB. Then, suddenly, he clapped his hands to his face, looking horrified. "Oh, no—what if she has a stroke right there in Albert's hospital room? How is anyone ever going to find an explanation for how Albert's ex-wife, who died in 1948, could suddenly die all over again in 1955? On an entirely different continent?"

"Wait," said Katherine. "You don't know if that happens or not? You didn't watch this already without us?"

"No," said JB through gritted teeth.

Hadley elaborated with a worried frown, "He thought he might need you, if things have to be fixed right away…"

 _Are they talking about sending the kids back in time again?_ wondered Angela. If Emily was back in the twenty-first century after returning to her original time period, that had to mean the hole made by Gary and Hodge had been fixed, right? Or did the fact that Mileva now had an Elucidator change even that?

Angela turned her attention back to the screen, where Mileva was explaining to Albert that the painkiller she was about to give him wasn't morphine. "I so wanted another conversation with the brilliant Johnnie I fell in love with all those years ago," she was saying.

"He's gone… dying… Now I'm just a foolish old man that the youngsters in the field make fun of. My search for a unified field theory… just tilting at windmills, they say…" Albert might have continued mumbling, except that the moment Mileva brushed something against his arm, he sat bolt upright, looking as if all the pain had left him in an instant. "What _was_ that?" he exclaimed.

"Oh, never mind the technicalities. You never did have much patience with chemistry," Mileva answered. "I can just tell you that it's a painkiller I picked up from the future…"

Angela didn't hear the rest of what Mileva said, because JB suddenly started shouting. "The future! How many extra time periods did she visit? And bringing back medicines… that's illegal! Why didn't we detect this?"

Hadley was frantically searching through his Elucidator. "I'm not finding evidence of that," he told JB. "She must have hidden her footprints really, really well."

Emily spoke up in a feeble voice, "Or maybe she's not telling the truth? Maybe she's counting on a placebo effect—fooling him into thinking he feels better?"

Angela wasn't sure if any placebo effect would be strong enough to cause the transformation they had just witnessed in Albert. He seemed almost entirely healthy again, and was reaching forward to hug his wife. Or—had someone said she was now his _ex_ -wife?

"Albert, no," said Mileva, taking a step back. "I just want to talk. To tell you the secrets I had to hide from you for almost fifty years. And… to reveal the answers you've been trying to find for the past few decades."

"That's it!" cried JB, slamming his hand into the side of his chair. "She's going to ruin everything!"

"Calm down," Hadley said soothingly. "Don't you think she had a reason for waiting until an hour before his death to talk to him?"

Albert, who no longer looked an hour away from death by any means, eagerly asked Mileva if his unified field theory was possible. Mileva, looking at him seriously, explained that she wanted to tell him the parts that were important to her first, just in case they ran out of time. Albert admitted grudgingly that that was only fair, since she was the one who had traveled through time to reach him.

"First of all," Mileva started, "Our Lieserl didn't die in 1903."

Angela guessed by the way Albert's eyes were filling with tears that Lieserl was the name of their daughter—Emily's original name.

"What? Our Lieserl—still alive? But how—and why didn't you tell me?" Albert was glancing frantically around the room. "Is she here with you? Can I finally meet her? What would she be now—fifty-three? You kept this a secret from me for more than fifty years?"

"I had to," Mileva answered in a quiet, apologetic voice. "And—she's not fifty-three yet."

Katherine let out a brief nervous giggle.

"Albert, some unprincipled time travelers from the future had the idea of kidnapping famous children from the past, to sell them to wealthy, self-satisfied people in the future," Mileva began her explanation.

Albert blinked. "Famous? But—Lieserl wasn't famous! Hardly anyone even knew she existed!"

"You are famous," Mileva said gently, as if trying to protect him from the magnitude of what she was saying. "The time travelers in the future wanted Lieserl to boast that she was related to you."

Albert opened his mouth, but Mileva kept talking. "These time travelers kidnapped our Lieserl, intending to sell her in the distant future. But their plans were interrupted. Lieserl ended up being adopted at the very end of this century, by a kind and loving couple who had no knowledge of who she was or that she came from another time. She had a wonderful life in the twenty-first century, and knew nothing about time travel until she was thirteen."

Albert leaned forward eagerly. "So that's when time travel was discovered? Two thousand… two thousand ten? Two thousand eleven?"

Mileva laughed. "No, Albert. Not until much later. Lieserl—Emily, I should call her, because that's what her adoptive parents named her—found out about time travel through a series of events that eventually led to her being sent back to 1903, during what would have been the very end of Lieserl's life if she hadn't been kidnapped from our time period the first time around. You can imagine my surprise when it looked like she'd aged from a toddler to a teenager in mere seconds! But she and the two other children she was with—Jonah and Katherine, their names were—helped me understand a little bit about what was going on. And then we—" She broke off, giving Albert a serious look. "Albert, I'm not sure if you remember this or not, but way back in 1903… when Lieserl was sick with scarlet fever… you were preoccupied with a theory. A theory that time had split into two separate dimensions in 1611."

Albert seemed to think for a moment, and then his eyes lit up. "I do remember that!" he cried. "I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned it—but yes—"

Mileva held up her hand, indicating that she was not done talking. "As it turns out, you were right. Time did split into two separate dimensions in 1611. And your formula for finding the subtle discrepancies in nature was right on the mark."

"I can't believe she's telling him this!" JB exploded. "This is going to ruin time completely!"

Albert looked crushed at Mileva's words. "It was? But… but I checked that formula, and it didn't work… and then I guess I got distracted with something else…"

"You did," said Mileva. "Because it would have been detrimental to time if you had pursued your research about the time split rather than coming up with the theories you ended up becoming famous for. I traveled with Emily and Jonah and Katherine to a place called a time hollow, where a person can stay for decades just learning and studying, and never getting any older, because time doesn't pass at all. You would have loved it there," she added with a chuckle.

Then her face grew more somber. "I watched how our entire lives were going to play out, Albert. How they played out in original time, without any time travelers intervening. I saw how important your theories and revelations were going to be to the entire world, how much of a public figure you were going to become. If you had stayed focused on splits in time, you would have changed too much of history and all of time would have collapsed."

"All of time _still_ might collapse from her being in that time period and telling Albert all this," JB grumbled. "For someone who saved time, she's doing a pretty good job of ruining it."

"In the time hollow," Mileva was continuing on-screen, "I learned all the ins and outs of time travel, and realized that, in order to preserve time, you _had_ to stop thinking about the time split. So I devised a plan to get you back on track with original time."

Albert looked intrigued, but didn't say anything.

Mileva continued. "Time has ways of keeping itself on track. Whenever someone enters a time period other than their own, they can see tracers. A tracer is… a visible but intangible representation of the way something would have gone if no time travelers had ever interfered. Tracers appear whenever something is different from the way it was in original time. In our apartment in Bern in 1903, there were tracers of the notes you'd taken detailing your early thoughts about relativity. Since I was native to the time period, I couldn't see the tracers, so I brought Jonah back with me. Emily's friend from the twenty-first century. We worked as a team—he told me what the tracer papers said, and I wrote it down, doing my best to imitate your handwriting. Then, if you remember, I handed them to you in Novi Sad, when you came after hearing the news of Lieserl's disappearance."

Albert's brow was wrinkled in confusion. "I remember that," he said. "But—why didn't you tell everything? Why didn't you tell the whole world? You could have claimed credit for discovering time travel! You could have claimed credit for _my_ discoveries. Why didn't you?"

"Albert, our children. It would have endangered our children," Mileva murmured, reaching out to take Albert's hand. "And I think you've enjoyed your fame so much more than I would have. And they were _your_ discoveries. I couldn't steal them from you."

Albert stared at her in admiration. "You're… amazing."

The two hugged, Albert murmuring about how Mileva had kept her secret for fifty-three years, Mileva reminding him that it had only been forty-five for her, since she had come from 1948 to visit him.

Albert let go of Mileva and laughed. "Oh, it's so good to talk to you again. Really talk, like we used to before you grew so sullen and silent…" A look of realization came over him. "Is _this_ why you started acting so depressed? Because you couldn't tell anyone what you knew?"

"It gets complicated. I would have been truly depressed without my secret," said Mileva. "I mean, really, Albert, moving us to Prague with all that sooty air when you knew Tete had those lung problems, and—" she stopped, waving her hands in the air as if wanting to backtrack on what she'd said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to restart old fights. I really have forgiven you."

"Tete." Albert looked mournful. "Hans Albert was here, watching over me all day—he's such a son to be proud of. But Tete—I haven't communicated with Tete in years. He's had such a sad life…with all your secret maneuverings, why couldn't you help our Tete, too?"

Angela guessed Tete was Albert and Mileva's son, probably born after Lieserl had vanished. She wanted to ask JB or Hadley what had made Tete's life so sad, but she didn't want to miss anything.

Her questions were answered momentarily. Mileva's face lit up and she whispered, "Oh, Albert, I so wanted you to ask about Tete. I told myself I wouldn't take the risk of telling you unless you actually asked. Unless you cared!"

"Of course I care about my own son," said Albert, looking affronted that Mileva would suggest such a thing. "I just never knew how to help. Mental illness is so…"

"Misunderstood in the twentieth century," Mileva filled in. "So I helped Tete in the only way I knew how. I took him to the future. To a time period where they knew how to cure him."

Angela barely had time to process this before JB shouted, "WHAT?"

"Shh!" Angela shushed him, wanting to hear exactly what Mileva was going to say next. The three children evidently felt the same way, because they all shushed him at the exact same time she did.

Albert looked puzzled. "No, no, Tete's still here. Back in Switzerland. I still pay for his care. His—confinement."

"That's another young man," Mileva explained. "I knew everyone had to think Tete was still in this century, still alive, so I borrowed this other man from the distant past, when madness was even more misunderstood. And… when those who succumbed to madness were routinely murdered. I saved this young man's life so I could send Tete to the future, to save his sanity. I made the swap when Tete was still a teenager. I only regret I couldn't save the fake Tete's sanity too, because he's such a delightful youth when he's lucid. But at least I managed to give him a better life than he would have had…"

"How could she have?" JB screamed in outrage. "That's two time periods she could have ruined! Why didn't we see this? How did she cover everything up so well?"

He and Hadley both started typing furiously on their Elucidators, no doubt trying to find evidence of what Mileva had done. "Let's focus on the more dangerous change first," suggested Hadley tensely. "What time period could she have taken Tete to?"

 _Some time later than my native time period,_ thought Angela. As far as she knew, mental illnesses were treatable, but not curable yet in the early twenty-first century.

JB was stabbing violently at his Elucidator, which, Angela realized, was actually _her_ Elucidator—the one Jonah had given to Mileva. "This could lead to such a major paradox," he groused. "People found the cure for mental illness before they figured out time travel—we're just going to have to undo this whole visit between Mileva and Albert, go back and erase Jonah giving her the Elucidator—"

"Undo?" Jonah interrupted. "Erase? You can't do that! Can you?"

Hadley nodded grimly. "Aye, lad. It's true, nothing like that has ever been tried, and it'd be incredibly risky given the proximity to stopped time, but—"

"Can't we at least see how the rest of the conversation goes?" suggested Emily.

JB reluctantly agreed, and everyone turned their attention back to what was happening on-screen. It sounded like Mileva had just finished explaining to Albert what he had been missing in his unified field theory. While all the drama had been playing out in the time hollow, Angela had missed the whole explanation.

 _Can we back that up?_ she wanted to ask. She had studied all of Einstein's theories during her thirteen years of studying physics, and she would be really interested to know exactly how closely related they were to the postulates behind actual time travel.

But hearing about Albert's unified field theory wasn't relevant to finding out how much Mileva had messed up time with the Elucidator, and JB and Hadley probably wouldn't want Angela knowing exactly how time travel worked anyway. So she kept quiet and just watched Albert and Mileva.

Whatever futuristic painkiller Mileva had given Albert seemed to be wearing off, because Albert was starting to look more the way he'd looked before—weary and in pain. Mileva apologized that she couldn't give him more painkiller, explaining that the nurse was about to return. She told Albert that when he died, he was going to leave two papers behind on his bedside table—a speech he'd written for Israeli Independence Day, and a math calculation he'd been working on. "People will like it that you kept looking for answers right up until you died," she told him.

"Always a seeker," mumbled Albert, now sunken back into his bed, sounding as if every word cost him effort. "Wish I could tell world… what I finally found."

"You can't always tell everyone everything you know," Mileva reminded him gently. Boy, was that the truth.

Albert closed his eyes and Mileva began smoothing his hair back from his face. "Shall I tell you what happened to Tete in the future?" she asked him.

"Yes… please," Albert whispered.

"I arranged Tete's transfer to the future the same way Lieserl's worked," Mileva began quietly. She wasn't exactly looking at Albert; it almost seemed as if she were trying to talk to someone else in the room. But the room was empty, devoid even of invisible time travelers. "Through time travel he became a baby once more, so he had no memories of me or you or the twentieth century."

"At least she took that precaution," muttered JB, although Angela could tell that he still disapproved of the fact that Mileva had taken her son to the future in the first place.

Mileva continued. "He was adopted by a very nice set of parents—better parents than you or me, I'm happy to say. He received a vaccine for his schizophrenia. So the thing that took over his twentieth-century life became as nothing for him, a momentary pinprick that he instantly forgot. He thrived in the future, and grew up happy, and you might say that he went into the family business—"

"Physics, you mean, like you and me?" Albert's voice was so faint, Angela had to strain to hear him. "Engineering, like my father and uncle and Hans Albert? Or—"

"Time," said Mileva firmly. Her face was now angled in such a way that it was like she was looking right into the time hollow, almost as if she could see Angela and the others. But that was impossible. "He became a time agent."

"Noooooo," JB buried his face in his hands, then just as quickly looked up again. "Tete couldn't have become a time agent," he moaned. "That situation is just ripe for paradoxes. It shouldn't have been allowed. It shouldn't—"

Angela shushed him again, because Mileva was still speaking and she didn't want to miss anything.

"I even met our son once, in his capacity as a time agent," she heard Mileva say. "In a manner of speaking. Time was stopped then, and I didn't know who he was until later, but I at least got to see him in person."

Angela gasped. She heard Emily do the same, and Katherine exclaimed, "Time was _stopped_? But—" She didn't finish.

There was a loud clunk on the floor as Hadley and JB dropped their Elucidators almost simultaneously, their faces identical masks of shock.

 _JB and Hadley were the only time agents who Mileva sort of "met" during stopped time, so…_ Angela's brain was whirling. _But they're not… they can't be…_

Mileva was smiling sweetly, and Angela had the definite sense that she _was_ looking into the time hollow, or at least in the direction she knew viewers in a time hollow would be able to see her from. "I'm sure everyone understands now that nothing I did can be changed," she said, as if she knew that just a few minutes ago, JB and Hadley had been talking about erasing Jonah giving her the Elucidator. "You can search for answers. You can ask how a time conundrum so intricately constructed was meant to be. But mostly I just want you to know that I did this out of love for you, Tete.

"Or should I say, I love you, my son JB?"


	32. Chapter 32

Chaos broke out in the time hollow. _"What?"_ shrieked Katherine.

"How is that even possible?" cried Jonah.

"Wait—JB— _you're_ Tete Einstein? You're my _brother_?" Emily exclaimed, gaping at JB.

JB was violently shaking his head no, and for a moment he seemed too stunned to say anything. Finally, as everyone was still gasping and exclaiming around him, he picked up the Elucidator from where he'd dropped it on the floor and started typing furiously. "We can't have this," he spluttered. "All of you—go back to your regular lives. Go back to normal. Forget all of this!"

"But—" Emily started to say, but before she got any further, she vanished. So did Jonah and Katherine. Angela braced herself for the feeling of falling through time—surely JB was going to send her back to her regular life too—but it didn't come. JB dropped the Elucidator back onto the floor and buried his face in his hands.

The room was silent. Angela chanced a glance at Hadley, who was still pale-faced and staring, dumbfounded, at JB.

Angela tried to process what had just happened. Jonah had given Mileva an Elucidator. Mileva had used the Elucidator to rescue her schizophrenic son from a twentieth-century mental asylum, unage him back into a baby, and bring him to the future. He had been cured and adopted and raised as JB.

But wait—Jonah had only had an Elucidator to give to Mileva because _Angela_ had had it. And both Jonah and Angela only knew about time travel in the first place because of JB.

 _How…?_

Angela didn't know how long she sat there, trying to puzzle everything out, trying to make it make sense in her brain. But eventually JB lifted his face, still looking completely in shock. "There's been some mistake," he said, his voice quavering. "This can't—I can't—no. It's not possible."

"You've always known you were adopted," Hadley reminded him gently, but even he sounded shaken.

"Lots of people are adopted. It doesn't have to mean…" JB shook his head. "No. She's wrong. She has me mixed up with someone else."

Angela remembered thinking the same thing back when JB had told her she would have been married with five kids if not for time travel. Somehow, that didn't seem so far-fetched now compared to this.

Hadley leaned forward and retrieved one of the Elucidators from the floor. He typed something in and watched the screen for a moment, then looked up, his face unusually solemn. "When you're ready… I'll put it up on the wall."

A few more seconds—minutes? hours?—passed, and then JB gave an almost imperceptible nod. Hadley clicked a button and a scene appeared on the wall in front of them.

Two people were traveling through what Angela recognized as the blackness of Outer Time—a middle-aged woman who looked slightly familiar, and a dark-haired teenage boy who was staring around, perplexed. They landed in a time hollow, and the woman began speaking to the boy in a foreign language.

Angela recognized her voice. With a jolt, she realized the woman was Mileva—a couple decades younger than she'd been when she'd visited her husband on his deathbed.

"Turn on translations," said Hadley.

"—wish I could do for you what I'm doing for my son, but that would defeat the purpose," Mileva was saying to the boy. "I apologize in advance for some of the things you'll have to go through. Even in the time period I'm bringing you to, treatment for mental illness is very primitive. Some of the drugs and 'therapies' they'll give you will harm rather than help you. But you'll be alive, and you'll have some happy moments. You'll be allowed to pursue music and art, and write as many poems as you want."

"And they won't try to kill me when I have one of my episodes?" the boy asked. "They won't beat me and try to scourge the demons out?"

Mileva shook her head. "No, Erwan. You will be in and out of the institution for several years, and I will care for you when you're at home. A time will come when your stay in the institution will become permanent, and it won't always be easy. But nobody will beat you or try to take your life."

The boy nodded. "Aye. I'll do it. I'll take the place of your son. Thank you for this opportunity."

Mileva's eyes misted up with tears. "I should be thanking you, not the other way around. I showed you the kinds of conditions you'll be living in for the rest of your life—I wish I could offer you better."

"Anything is better than what I would have had," said the boy.

Mileva hugged him. "Let's get started, then. I'm going to change your appearance—make you look more like my son, so nobody gets suspicious."

Mileva looked down at the device she was holding—an Elucidator, Angela realized. _The_ Elucidator. She typed something in and the boy's facial features instantly changed.

"How did she do that?" Angela exclaimed. "Elucidators can change what people look like?" She shouldn't have been surprised, given what else Elucidators could do. Still, it wasn't something she'd been expecting.

JB gave a little moan, his eyes fixed on the boy's new face. Angela studied the face, noting the color of his eyes, the structure of his cheekbones, the shape of his nose. He could definitely be a younger version of JB.

"I'm going to turn you invisible now, and bring you to my house in Switzerland, 1926," Mileva said.

The boy took on the crystalline form of an invisible time traveler, and an instant later both he and Mileva were spinning through the darkness of Outer Time once again.

They landed in a bedroom, where a visible boy identical to the invisible one with Mileva was lying on a bed, staring at the ceiling. "Tete, it's time," said Mileva softly.

The boy on the bed gave no indication he'd heard her. Mileva walked over and gently placed her hand on his shoulder. "Tete. Can you hear me?"

The boy's eyes drifted over to Mileva's face, and he stared blankly at her for a moment. Then recognition flashed in his eyes. "Mother!" He looked around the room, his eyes passing over the invisible boy as if he wasn't even there. "How long… how long have I been lying here?"

"A couple hours," Mileva answered sadly.

A scared look came into Tete's eyes. "Something's wrong with me, Mother. I can't explain it. Sometimes I feel… like I'm not myself. Like I don't have control of my thoughts. Almost like I don't even know who I am."

"You're my son." Mileva hugged him tightly, and when she let go, Angela could see the pain etched across her face. "You will always be my son. I will always love you."

"I think it's getting worse," Tete said quietly. "It's happening more frequently now. Mother… I want to _do_ something with my life. I want to fall in love, to get married, to have children. I want to go to university and get a degree and hold down a steady job. I don't want to go mad."

"You won't go mad," Mileva told him. "You're going to have the chance to do all of those things. Just—trust me." Her voice broke.

Tete stood up and the invisible boy took his place on the bed, turning visible a split second before the room vanished and Mileva and Tete started floating through Outer Time.

"It's happening again!" Tete's exclamation was one of utter panic. "Mother, I'm having another hallucination!"

"This isn't a hallucination," Mileva took both of her son's hands in her own. "This is real. Tete, I love you so much. I'm going to make sure you have the very best life you can have."

Was it Angela's imagination, or did Tete seem to be shrinking? His facial hair was disappearing, his features were smoothing out… he was un-aging before her very eyes.

He didn't seem afraid anymore, either. On the contrary, he was looking around Outer Time with great interest. "What is this place, Mama?" he asked. "What are we doing?"

"We're time traveling," Mileva told him.

Tete's eyes grew wide. "Time traveling? Like in the make-believe stories you used to tell me when I was little? It's real?"

"It's real," Mileva confirmed.

The two of them floated on for several more minutes, their arms around each other, laughing and reminiscing, Tete getting younger and younger with each moment that passed. Eventually, when Tete was no more than an infant in Mileva's arms, they landed in a time hollow.

Mileva collapsed on the floor, sobbing. "What have I done to you?" she cried. "My son… my baby… I'm going to miss you so much."

The scene was so gut-wrenching, Angela found it hard to watch. Instead she focused on JB—the real, grown, adult JB who was sitting inches from her, his eyes glued to the scene playing out on the wall. "That's not me," he whispered. "It's someone else. It's not me."

Mileva finally got up, the baby in her arms, and typed instructions into the Elucidator. A scene appeared on one of the walls in her time hollow, showing a happy little family sitting down for a meal. The father was chopping food into small pieces on a plate that appeared to be themed to some kids' cartoon Angela had never heard of, and the mother was pouring milk into a cup in front of a little boy who looked about three years old. All three of the family members seemed relaxed and happy.

"Noooo," moaned JB. Hadley put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"That's your new family," Mileva murmured to the baby in her arms. "I picked them out especially for you. I went through dozens and dozens of families before I found the right one, but here they are. The father is a microsurgeon. The mother works from home as a children's book illustrator. Both of them are loving, caring, kind, amazing parents. And that little boy, Matteo Marcus Mandonius T'Kah, will be your brother and your best friend."

The room was quiet except for JB's ragged breathing. Angela, JB, and Hadley watched as Mileva cradled her son in her arms and rocked him back and forth. "You won't remember me," Mileva whispered to the baby. "And that's the way I want it. But as you grow up, I hope somehow you know that I did this because I love you. Because I want you to have a better life."

Her surroundings disappeared, and re-formed as a small, cozy-looking room with colorful posters advertising the New Horizons Adoption Agency. A moment later, an older woman stepped into the room. "Oh, I didn't see you there at first. How may I help you?" she asked Mileva.

"I'm here to give my son up for adoption," Mileva answered, her voice sad but certain. "I've spent several days browsing through your agency's family portfolios, and I've decided I would like him to be adopted by Jeffery and Rosalie T'Kah, if they're interested."

The older woman smiled. "The T'Kahs are wonderful people, and they've been waiting for a second child for quite some time. Would you like to schedule a visit with them?"

"No, thank you," said Mileva. "I've already made my decision."

"Very well, then," the woman replied. "We'll start the process."

She left the room and came back with a small silver device, which she touched to Mileva's arm and then the baby's. "Is that an Elucidator?" Angela asked.

Her question was answered by the woman on-screen. "I'm just using my MedScan to confirm that you really are this child's biological mother—not that I don't believe you; it's just a standard procedure to make sure everything's legit…" She consulted her MedScan. "Mother-son match, as expected. Would you like your genetic sequence to be saved into the system so your son can someday find you via GeneTracker or some other genealogy tool?"

"No thank you," said Mileva firmly. "And I would like the records of his adoption to be closed."

"Okay." The woman typed something into the device. "Your genetic sequence has been deleted. Now, just looking at the overview… I'm seeing a few red flags in the child's health sequence. Is there any family history of medical problems?"

"Schizophrenia," answered Mileva. "And asthma."

"Both easily curable. He'll receive those vaccinations, and any others he needs, before we hand him over to the T'Kahs."

The woman asked Mileva a few more questions, and handed Mileva what looked like some high-tech version of a laptop, and Mileva got to work doing what was probably some futuristic version of paperwork. Once she was done, Mileva looked at her son for a long time and kissed him gently on the forehead before handing him to the woman from the adoption agency.

The camera followed the adoption agency worker, holding the baby, into what looked like a doctor's office. A doctor—looking remarkably like doctors from Angela's time period, except with some strange sort of eyeglass perched in front of his right eye—gave the baby a quick check-up, including a few immunizations that seemed to be administered the same way Mileva had administered Albert's pain medication. The doctor gave the baby back to the adoption lady, who carried him out into a room where the family from the walls of Mileva's time hollow was waiting. Both parents' faces lit up when they saw the baby; they rushed over to see him and hold him and let him grasp their fingers in his tiny hands. The mother took the baby in her arms while the father lifted the toddler up to see his new little brother. "There he is," the father crooned. "Our little Alonzo."

Hadley paused the image on the screen, and both he and Angela turned their full attention to JB, who was staring blankly ahead.

"All my life," JB said numbly. "All my life I knew I was adopted. All these years as a time agent I've worked to combat companies like Interchronological Rescue. I've spent these past several weeks interacting with adopted kids who never knew they were from different centuries. And yet it never _once_ crossed my mind that I could be just like them."

"It's a lot to take in," said Hadley sympathetically.

"I always figured my birth parents were—you know, teenagers, maybe, or people who just for whatever reason weren't able to raise a child. I thought my birthdate was my real birthdate. I thought—I thought I was really _me._ "

"You are you," Angela spoke up. "This doesn't change who you are as a person. Who your adoptive parents raised you to be. You're still the same person you've always been."

"Not always," muttered JB.

"What Angela's trying to say is, the fact that you were someone else in the past doesn't change anything about who you are today," Hadley clarified. "You're still Alonzo. Still JB."

"It changes _everything!_ " JB yelled, and Angela jumped, taken aback by his sudden intensity. "Don't you realize what just happened here? I almost undid my own existence! I was all set to send Jonah back in time, to re-do his goodbye with Mileva, have him not give her the Elucidator this time around… the very paradox of me doing that would have collapsed all of time forever!"

"It's possible the Elucidator wouldn't have allowed it," Hadley said, but Angela was pretty sure he was only saying that in an effort to assuage JB.

JB stared wide-eyed from Hadley to Angela. "This whole thing… this whole… everything, with the time crash and Jonah and all the kids staying in the twenty-first century and learning about time travel… I was against all of it from the beginning! If I'd had my way, I would've ended up undoing my own existence dozens of times over!"

Angela shivered. "Dozens of times over?"

"If I hadn't been frozen in this time hollow, I never would have let Mileva watch how the rest of her life was going to play out. If I hadn't been _stuck_ in this time hollow, I wouldn't have let Mileva learn about time travel in the first place. If I'd had any control over the situation at all, I wouldn't have let Jonah and Katherine go back to 1903." JB clasped his hands to the sides of his head, struck by a new revelation. "That was supposed to be random! The year… I thought it was just because of Einstein… but it _had_ to work out that way…" He closed his eyes for a moment, maybe praying, maybe trying to wish the whole situation away. "Back in the time cave, I was going to send them all back. I would've sent _Jonah_ back, to his original identity, and he never would have time traveled again after that." He opened his eyes abruptly. "The time crash itself wasn't even supposed to happen! Here I've been, this whole time trying to preserve as much of original time as possible, when in original time I wouldn't have even existed."

 _Oh yeah,_ Angela realized. _Jonah is only Jonah because the time crash happened, so if it_ _hadn't_ _happened, he wouldn't have been around to give Mileva the Elucidator._

Would someone else have provided an Elucidator for Mileva, at some point down the road? Or would Tete just have stayed Tete, in and out of twentieth-century mental institutions, with the person Angela knew as JB never existing?

"Everything I ever tried to prevent was _necessary_ for me to become the person trying to prevent it," muttered JB. "My whole life is a paradox."

"Not really," Angela said slowly, still trying to make sense of it all. "I think it's kind of like what happened with you and Jonah and Katherine in the 1600s. There were so many ways it _could_ have gone wrong, _could_ have created a paradox big enough to destroy all of time… but it didn't."

"Which means… what? That everything that happened, every choice any one of us made throughout this whole thing—maybe even our whole _lives_ —was never our choice to begin with? Are any of our decisions really ours? Or do we always end up choosing whatever we _have_ to choose, no matter what?"

Angela looked over at Hadley, hoping he would have the answer. But he looked as flummoxed as she felt.

JB sighed. "I remember when I first started becoming interested in history, around my second or third year of high school. It fascinated me, looking at everything that had happened, through hundreds and thousands of years, to bring the world and civilization to what it is today. I remember looking at certain eras and thinking, _What if that had been different?_ and, _What if such-and-such a war had happened a century later?_ And then thinking about how each miniscule little change would have had repercussions that rippled outward and changed life as we know it in who knows how many ways. That's why I became a time agent." He started fidgeting with his fingers. "As interesting as it was to speculate about alternate versions of history, I knew that if anyone ever tried to change history for real, we'd be in big trouble. So I dedicated my life to making sure history stayed on track. I was so convinced that time had to flow along its original path…" He shook his head in a gesture that reminded Angela of a dog removing water from its fur. "So what do we do now? Do nothing, so we won't mess anything up? Do whatever we want, because it's all going to have the same result anyway? How are we supposed to know what's the right thing to do?"

"We'll have to talk to the rest of the time agency," Hadley spoke up. "Share what we've learned and see how they want to proceed. Of course, I can't imagine any of them having any more answers than we do at the moment."

Angela cleared her throat, not knowing whether the advice she was about to give would be helpful or not. "Maybe you guys should just keep doing what you've been doing? You know, trying your best to do what you think is right, without over-worrying about it? Things seem to have mostly worked out so far."

JB sighed again. "It's just going to be hard now, making any decisions, knowing what we know. Knowing that anything we do or don't do could end up having such an extreme impact."

"But isn't that just like any decisions we make, even without time travel?" Angela pointed out. "People do things every day without knowing what impact their actions will have. My parents met because they both decided to go to Kroger on the same day. They didn't wake up thinking, 'Today I'm going to meet the person I'll eventually marry.'"

JB looked pensive. "That's a good point… I don't know. I'm going to need a lot of time to think all of this over."

"Well, you're in the right place for that," said Hadley with a slight smile. "Why don't you stay here for as long as you need to, and I'll head to Time Agency headquarters and let them know what's going on."

"I'll meet you there eventually," JB told him. "But I'll probably stop by and see my parents and brother after I leave here. They deserve to know about this."

Angela took this as her cue to leave. "I'll head back to the twenty-first century and let you have some time alone," she told JB. "But if you need someone to talk to at any point coming up… I'll be available."

Hadley finished fiddling with one of the Elucidators and handed it to Angela. "I'm giving you my Elucidator, since I imagine the time agency will want to take a look at the other one. But I've programmed it to work the same way as the one you're used to."

"Will I still be able to call you?" Angela asked, then felt her cheeks flush at how anxious she sounded at the idea of not being able to call Hadley.

"Of course. I'll put in a request for a new Elucidator as soon as I get back to headquarters." Hadley smiled at her. "At some point we can finish that lunch date."

Maybe things could work out between her and Hadley, Angela reflected that night as she got ready for bed. It seemed impossible, but then again, so did the idea that JB had been born to the Einsteins in the early 1900s, and was only himself as a result of the time crash he'd been involved in _after_ growing up as JB.

Did this mean that the time crash itself was supposed to happen? That sometimes original time was wrong?

Anything was possible.


	33. Chapter 33

A week passed by without any news from JB or Hadley. Angela frequently used the Elucidator to check in on the kids, particularly Jonah, Katherine, and Emily. All three of them seemed to have similar ideas—within the next few days after their journey to 1903, they could all be seen reading books and news articles about Albert Einstein. Jonah and Katherine went to the library with their dad and checked out several thick volumes apiece about Einstein's theories. Emily read books and computer articles about Einstein as well, but her main focus seemed to be on his family.

At one point, Angela caught a glimpse of Emily writing in a journal. _The books that talk about Mileva don't even scratch the surface of who she was as a person. I know who she was. I know why she made the decisions she made. Mileva loved her children—me, JB, and Hans Albert—and everything she did was to make sure each of us had the best life possible. I will always be grateful to her for allowing me to come back here and live my wonderful life with the people I consider to be my real family._

 _It's so weird thinking about JB as my brother. He's old enough to be my dad, but he's technically my "little" brother—I was born in 1902 (which in itself is completely bizarre) and he was born in 1910. I can't stop thinking about how shocked he looked in the time hollow when we found out. He was frozen with his back to the screen the entire time the rest of us were watching Mileva's life play out, so he didn't even get to see how much Tete looked like him. And of course the rest of us didn't notice, because he didn't look_ _exactly_ _like JB as we know him and we weren't paying that close attention to him anyway. Even if I had noticed they looked alike, I wouldn't have jumped to the conclusion that they were the same person, because… well, how could they be?_

 _I'm really curious about how things stand with time now. I'm guessing everything was sorted out, because everything seems normal, and time hasn't frozen again or anything like that. I wish I'd exchanged phone numbers with Jonah and Katherine—not like we really had an opportunity to do that at any point during that adventure. It would be nice to talk to them, to see how they're doing._

 _Part of me really wants to tell Mom and Dad about all this. I've never kept anything secret from them before. The other part thinks that's a bad idea. I don't need to worry them with information about me being sent to 1903 Serbia and almost dying from scarlet fever and time nearly coming to an end. Besides, now that I've had my turn going back in history, time travel is over for me… right?_

Angela tore her eyes away from the Elucidator screen, ashamed of herself. Checking in on the kids by periodically viewing a couple minutes of their lives was one thing. It was a necessary action to keep the kids safe. But reading someone's private thoughts in a journal? That was worse than using the monitors in the time cave, which Angela had sworn to herself she wasn't going to do.

Still, she could empathize with Emily wanting someone to talk to about the whole ordeal. Maybe she would go pay Emily a visit sometime, and they could talk things over together.

She couldn't do it right now. Emily's mom was announcing that dinner was ready, and Emily was shutting her journal and walking out of her room.

"Return to home screen," Angela told the Elucidator. She didn't want to spy on Emily anymore; she'd invaded the poor girl's privacy enough for one day. And besides, the prickly feeling on the back of her neck was back. The feeling that had been creeping up on her more and more frequently ever since the day she'd spoken to Jonah and Katherine at their church. The feeling that someone was watching her every move.

 _You're so paranoid,_ she told herself as she turned the TV on to mask the deadening silence that presided over her house. Up until just recently, she'd been okay with the silence. She'd liked it. It was perfect for long days of uninterrupted research. But now that she'd traveled through time and met all the time agents and missing kids, the silence seemed almost oppressive, a constant reminder that she was alone.

Alone and being watched. By the time agency, no doubt. Angela didn't want to complain to Hadley or JB about it—they had enough on their plates, and might not understand her dislike of being spied on anyway, if spying on people in the past was such a normal thing for time agents. But still, didn't the agency have better things to do than to spy on _Angela_?

A scary thought crossed her mind as she looked over at the calendar on her wall. Today was November 19. The big day was only two days away. What if it wasn't the time agency spying on her after all? What if it was Gary and Hodge?

Angela thought about using the Elucidator's version of a texting app to send a message to Hadley—just a short question about whether anyone in the time agency was currently observing her. But she decided against it. If it was Gary or Hodge who was spying on her right now, they'd probably be able to see the message as she typed it in. That would tip them off to the fact that she suspected they were spying, and who knew what kind of repercussions that could have.

 _It's probably not them anyway. And even if it is, they're not going to end up_ _getting_ _to you. You rescue someone else from them on November 21!_

Angela's sleep that night was restless and interrupted, with continuous thoughts about November 21 and the contents of the note, which she had long since memorized. _It's very important that you bring your own Elucidator… don't tell me or JB… don't say anything about getting this letter… meet me at the airfield where Charles Lindbergh flies on the afternoon of August 15… as soon as you can get me away from Gary and Hodge, we can go rescue JB._

What was going to happen to JB? Who or what would he need to be rescued from?

Did this have anything to do with JB's original identity? It could. Mileva had told the boy who had replaced her son that she was bringing him to her apartment in 1926. Was someone going to realize six years later, in 1932, that the boy wasn't actually Tete? Was someone going to try to find and kidnap the real Tete?

 _People from 1932 don't have Elucidators,_ Angela reminded herself. _They don't know about time travel. This probably has to do with the missing Lindbergh baby, not with JB. In fact, the letter's probably_ _from_ _whichever kid is the missing Lindbergh baby._

Jonah. It could definitely be Jonah. She'd had that suspicion before, but now it was seeming even more plausible.

 _So even with all my efforts to keep him and Katherine safe, I'm doomed to fail?_ she wondered. _He's going to get taken by Gary and Hodge anyway?_

Now she understood what JB had been saying in the time hollow, about how hard it was going to be to make decisions, knowing that some things were fated to turn out a certain way no matter what.

Indecision and anxiety ate away at Angela for a good portion of the next day, which she spent on her Elucidator, checking in on each of the thirty-six kids at least once, some—such as Jonah—multiple times. Everybody seemed to be going about their normal lives; the only thing that looked even slightly out of the ordinary was one girl, Daniella McCarthy, sitting in the backseat of a car with a cooler next to her.

Emily was currently relaxing outside by herself, reading. Maybe now would be a good time to go visit her. It would at least help Angela get her mind off of tomorrow.

Angela was just starting to stand up when she heard a loud, insistent pounding at her front door. She startled at the noise, then proceeded cautiously toward its source. It was unusual in and of itself for someone to be _knocking_ at her door. But pounding?

Angela peered out the window next to the door and saw a skinny teenage boy in jeans and a black sweatshirt. When he moved his head, she caught a glimpse of his face.

Gavin Danes.

She flung open the door. "What's going on?" she asked Gavin.

He looked up at her, his eyes wide with fear. "You need to call the time agency right now! Gary and Hodge—they escaped! They're coming for us!"

Angela's heart caught in her throat. This was it. Her worst suspicions were confirmed.

It was already starting.

Angela yanked the Elucidator out of her pocket and opened her mouth, about to order it to call Hadley. But before she got any words out, Gavin had reached out with catlike reflexes and snatched the Elucidator from her hands. "Take me to the time cave!" he screamed.

Then he and the Elucidator vanished.


	34. Chapter 34

Angela stood gaping at the spot where Gavin had just been, the realizations of what had just happened hitting her one at a time.

 _He stole my Elucidator._

 _Gary and Hodge are on the loose._

 _I now have no way of contacting the time agency or protecting any of the kids._

Although had Gavin even been telling the truth about Gary and Hodge escaping from time prison, or had that just been a ruse to get Angela to pull the Elucidator out so he could steal it?

Either way, Angela needed to get to the time cave as quickly as possible. She needed to get the Elucidator back. And she needed to find out why Gavin had stolen it in the first place.

Angela grabbed her keys and hurried to her car. It was only once she'd made it onto the main road that she realized she wasn't entirely sure how to get to the time cave. She'd driven there that one time with Hadley, but the Elucidator had been navigating the entire way, and she'd been a lot more focused on, well, Hadley, than on remembering the directions for future reference.

"Elucidator, give me directions to—" She broke off. Over the past several days, she'd gotten so used to having the Elucidator with her at all times, that it felt almost unnatural to be without it.

It also felt lonely. She had no way of contacting JB or Hadley now. And they had no way of contacting her. She couldn't believe how disconnected that made her feel. Before she'd become involved with time travel, she'd been one of the rare few people in the twenty-first century who didn't own a cell phone. She hadn't needed one. And she hadn't felt disconnected then, because she'd been engrossed in her research and hadn't been thinking about what she was missing out on by not being in touch with anyone.

But now she had people to be in touch with. And now she had a responsibility where she _needed_ to be in touch with them.

 _Why is it always in the middle of the biggest time emergencies that I can't reach anyone?_ she groveled, thinking about last time, when everything had frozen and the Elucidator hadn't let her call any of the time agents.

This was even worse. At least she'd _had_ an Elucidator last time.

Angela shook her head to clear her thoughts. She needed to focus on where she was going, so she could get the Elucidator back and call the time agency as soon as possible.

She managed to find Clarksville Valley High School, relying partly on memory and partly on road signs. As she pulled into the empty parking lot, she eyed the woods behind the school. Some trail back there would lead her to the cave, right? This wasn't the way she and Hadley had taken, but Hadley had told her that when Gary and Hodge had brought the kids, they'd used a trail behind the school. So Angela could get to the time cave from here, as long as she found the right trail.

It wasn't that difficult. Just a short distance away was an opening in the woods that became a walking path, wide enough for three or four people to walk side by side. Angela followed the path, glad her sneakers had been the shoes closest to the front door when she'd left her house. _I really hope this trail doesn't split off later on,_ she thought as she jogged past a fallen tree. _Because I'd have no idea which way to go._

It felt like forever before Angela finally caught a glimpse of a large rock formation ahead. _That's got to be it,_ she thought. The area looked different from how she remembered it last time—a lot of the larger trees that had surrounded the cave were gone, leaving a larger clearing, and there was debris everywhere. It looked like there'd been some sort of storm, although Angela didn't remember hearing any thunder or high winds the last few days. Was this even the right place?

She breathed a sigh of relief when she came closer and realized that the rock formation indeed was the time cave. And the door was open, so she'd be able to go right in, find Gavin, and get the Elucidator back from him. She stopped to catch her breath for a moment, so Gavin wouldn't hear her approaching and close the door. Then she crept toward the opening of the cave.

 _What if this is all a trap?_ she thought suddenly, her old paranoia surfacing again. _Or what if… what if Gary and Hodge were close by when Gavin told the Elucidator to bring him here, and they heard, and they've already caught Gavin and now they're waiting to get me?_

Had Gavin gone to the time cave to get away from Gary and Hodge? Or to get the Elucidator away from Angela?

Angela stepped into the cave, pushing down her questions and fears. The light was already on, so she could see all the benches, and the shadowy area in the back where the monitors were hidden. She walked briskly, purposefully, toward that section, rationalizing that if Gavin or anyone else was hiding back there, he'd probably already seen her. "Gavin?" she called out. "It's just me. Angela. I'm not going to do anything to you, but I really need that Elucidator back."

She expected something to happen. Either Gavin would say something in response, or she'd hear him tell the Elucidator to take him somewhere else, or Gary and Hodge would jump out from the shadows and grab her, or she'd feel herself falling through time. But the only response was the faint echo of her own voice.

Angela stepped into the dark area herself, and looked around, letting her eyes adjust. All she saw was rock, rock, and more rock. She stepped further into the very recesses of the cave, keeping her eyes and ears out for any hint that she wasn't the only person in there. "Hello?" she called out. "Is anybody here?"

Again, there was no answer. Angela gingerly felt along the walls, moving slowly into the section of the cave where it was too dark to see anything at all, preparing to fight back if anyone suddenly grabbed her. But she made it all the way around the very back wall of the cave without anything happening.

She looked around the brighter sections again, just in case she'd missed anything. She hadn't. Everything looked the same as it had looked when she first arrived.

Gavin was nowhere to be found.

 _What do I do now?_ Angela wondered. If Gavin was no longer in the time cave, she had no idea where he was. He could be at his house, or at someone else's house, or anywhere in all of time for that matter. He may have left the time cave of his own volition, or he might have been kidnapped by Gary and Hodge. Angela had no way of knowing.

Unless… her gaze flickered over to the wall on which Hadley had gotten the monitors to appear last time she was here. If she could get the monitors working, she could at least find out where Gavin was.

She remembered that Hadley had placed his Elucidator in a certain crevice on the wall, and then pressed a button. Angela felt around for the button, hoping it would still work without an Elucidator.

It took several minutes, but eventually she found it. She pressed hard on the button, but nothing happened. She didn't even feel the button move. It just felt like she was pressing down on a piece of rock.

 _The button moved last time I pushed it, right? When I was here with Hadley?_

Maybe this wasn't the right spot in the rock. But it had to be—there was the crevice, right next to it. And this was about where she and Hadley had been standing, because she'd been able to see the benches, and the door, and—

The door. The door had been closed last time, turning the cave into a time hollow. Maybe the button only worked when the door was closed.

Angela hurried over and found the keypad on the wall. She typed in 3-6-R-R, and the door slid shut. Then she ran back over to the crevice and pushed the button.

It moved this time. It pushed down just like it had when she'd been there with Hadley. But the wall didn't instantly light up with thirty-six monitors. It stayed stubbornly, resolutely, rock.

Angela pushed the button again. And again. And again. She felt around the crevice for other buttons, but found none. "Voice commands," she said, her finger on the button. "Turn on the monitors. Call the time agency. Do _something_!"

Still nothing happened.

Angela's shoulders sagged, and she heaved a heavy sigh, completely out of hope. This cave had been her last shot at finding Gavin, her last chance at getting her Elucidator back, checking up on all the kids, learning where Gary and Hodge were, and contacting the time agency. Now she'd just have to hope the time agency would somehow find out about this on their own. If Gary and Hodge really were on the loose, the time agency would know that, right? The time prison guards would have informed them?

If Gary and Hodge hadn't actually escaped, and Gavin had just been trying to steal her Elucidator for his own gain, was it possible that the time agency would be able to find out about that too? Had Hadley thought to program his Elucidator to notify someone if it ended up in the hands of anyone but Angela?

That was wishful thinking. The first time around, when JB had given her an Elucidator right here in this very cave, he'd said that they weren't going to do anything special to it. They were just going to trust Angela to use it properly and never, ever let anyone else touch it.

And she had broken their trust. _I could have handled that situation differently,_ she told herself, picturing the way she'd whipped the Elucidator out of her pocket the moment Gavin had mentioned Gary and Hodge. _I could have…_

But what else _could_ she have done? She'd just been trying to do her job of protecting the kids and alerting the time agency if anything happened.

She needed to make sure all the other kids were okay. She started toward the door, ready to open it and head back out to her car, but then she stopped, realizing what the closed door meant. _This is a time hollow. When the door is shut, this cave is pulled out of time. I can spend as much time as I need in here, developing a plan or trying to get the monitors to work, and when I come out, no time at all will have passed in the twenty-first century._

It killed her to wait, but developing a plan made more sense than just blindly leaving the time cave without an idea of what she was going to do. _I'll go to Gavin's house first,_ she decided. _I'll even ring the doorbell and speak to his parents if I have to, just to find out if he's home. I'll pretend I'm… a friend's mother, maybe? A neighbor who saw him accidentally leave something somewhere? A reporter wanting to interview a random sampling of middle schoolers?_ She wasn't sure Gavin's parents would fall for any of those stories, but they were worth a try.

 _Then I'll go to Jonah and Katherine's house_ , she determined. _Whether I have the Elucidator or not. Because they're the ones I'm mostly supposed to be watching out for._

After she checked on Jonah and Katherine, she would move along to Chip, since he was in the same neighborhood, and then she would—

"Angela?"

Angela jumped. So she wasn't alone in the time cave after all? Who had just spoken her name?

She turned her head, and her eyes fell on one of the last people she'd ever thought she would be happy to see.


	35. Chapter 35

"Tida!" Angela exclaimed. The fact that Tida was here had to mean that the time agency knew about what had happened, right?

Well, even if they hadn't known before, Angela could tell them now. "Gavin took my Elucidator, and he said that—"

Tida rolled her eyes. "We _know._ Obviously I watched everything that happened before coming here. I _knew_ giving Elucidators to time natives was a bad idea."

Angela bit her lip so she wouldn't end up saying something like, _Oh yeah? Like when Jonah gave that Elucidator to Mileva Einstein and ended up avoiding a paradox that could have ended all of time?_

"Anyway," Tida continued. "I've been instructed to bring you to Headquarters and fill you in on everything that just happened."

"Where are Hadley and JB?" Angela asked. "Are they okay?"

"They're fine," said Tida. "They're just busy dealing with the _important_ aspects of this fiasco."

"Fiasco?" Angela questioned, her pulse starting to race. "So Gary and Hodge did escape! Or—what did Gavin do with my Elucidator?"

"As I just said, I'll explain everything to you once we get to Headquarters. Personally, I don't even see the need to _bring_ you to Headquarters, since we're in a time hollow right now, but that's not my decision to make." Tida pulled an Elucidator out of her pocket and pointed it at Angela. "I'll see you there," she said, and all of Angela's surroundings disappeared.

Angela landed on something soft, with light filtering in through her eyelids. It took her a couple minutes to realize that the soft thing was a couch and that she was in a small white room with bright fluorescent lights. Tida was sitting across from her, looking amused. "Timesickness is always worse when you're not in your native time period. We've discovered it's usually a direct correlation—the further away you are from when you're supposed to be, the worse the timesickness is. And you're _very_ far away from when you're supposed to be."

Angela struggled to open her mouth and form words. Tida was right. This timesickness was a lot worse than anything she'd felt arriving home or in a time hollow.

Tida smirked a little, watching Angela try to talk. Finally, Angela was able to ask, "So… what… happened… with… my… Elucidator?"

"Hadley's Elucidator," Tida corrected. "He was letting you borrow it."

Angela had the distinct sense that Tida was going to make this as difficult as possible. She pushed herself up into a sitting position and fixed Tida with what she hoped was an authoritative stare. "I know you don't like me," she said firmly. Speaking was coming more easily now. "And I know you don't approve of time natives knowing about time travel and using Elucidators and things like that. But whatever just happened with Gavin and that Elucidator concerns me as much as it concerns the time agency. JB assigned me to watch over those kids. This will be over a lot more quickly if you just tell me what happened without inserting a bunch of comments about how you don't think I belong here."

Tida scowled, then pursed her lips. "Fine," she said briskly. "Gavin was lying about Gary and Hodge already being out of time prison. He told you that so he could steal the Elucidator from you and use it to _break_ Gary and Hodge out of time prison. Apparently they'd given him some sort of code, and contact information for the lone girl who hadn't been in the time cave with the other thirty-five. He had called her a few times over the past few weeks, when she was still living in Michigan. He'd instructed her to call him as soon as she got to Ohio."

"Was it Daniella McCarthy?" Angela asked, remembering the girl she'd seen on the Elucidator riding in a car with her parents.

"Yes," answered Tida. "Gavin got a call from Daniella late in the afternoon on November 20, 2012. She said she was on her way to see Jonah Skidmore and Chip Winston, two of the other missing children. Apparently they had contacted her a few weeks before as well, back when it was still Damaged Time. Daniella knew that Jonah, Chip, and Gavin all had information about her birth family or her adoption, and she wanted to meet up and talk with them. Meanwhile, Gavin was working for Gary and Hodge. They'd told him back at the time cave that if they ended up getting sent to time prison, he should wait for a couple weeks and then grab an Elucidator as soon as he got the chance and type in the code to break them out."

"Why would Gavin want to break them out?" Angela wanted to know. "Gary and Hodge were going to turn everyone into babies again and send them to the future. I know JB originally said everyone would have to go back and live the rest of their lives in the past, but he changed his mind later and decided they could come back to the twenty-first century after fixing the past."

Tida laughed condescendingly. "Yes, well, believe it or not, some people would actually prefer to live in the 'future' rather than the twenty-first century. See, in your time period, there are a lot of diseases that aren't curable yet, such as hemophilia, which is what Gavin has. In _my_ time period, hemophilia can be cured by a single injection. Gavin thought that sounded pretty good. And… Gary and Hodge told him that if he helped them break out of time prison, _he'd_ get to go to the future and live there as a completely cured thirteen-year-old, and he could come back and visit people in the twenty-first century whenever he wanted. Not go back to being a baby."

"Were they telling the truth?"

Tida snorted. "What do you think? Of course they weren't telling the truth. Gary and Hodge had every intention of turning Gavin into a baby as soon as possible. But they knew they wouldn't be able to do it right away, which is why they got Gavin to contact Daniella. His birth sister."

"The Romanovs!" Angela exclaimed, having just figured it out. "Anastasia and Alexei Romanov. That's who Daniella and Gavin were. Right?" She remembered seeing their names on the seating chart for the plane, and she thought she recalled learning in one of her high school history classes that the youngest Romanov child had had hemophilia.

"Mmm-hmm," said Tida, looking bored. "The plan was for Daniella to find Jonah and Chip—Jonah's sister Katherine too, if she happened to be with them—and for Gavin to get to them once they were all together. Gavin was supposed to grab all of them and tell the Elucidator it was time to go. The Elucidator would take them to the future, and Gary and Hodge would be waiting to give Gavin a mansion and his own Elucidator and a bunch of other stuff. That was what Gavin believed."

Angela sucked in her breath. Obviously, the part about Gavin getting all that stuff and being able to live in the future as a thirteen-year-old hadn't happened—but did that mean that Gavin, Jonah, Chip, Daniella, and possibly Katherine had all been turned into babies?

"Of course, it didn't really happen that way," Tida went on. "As soon as Gavin got the call from Daniella saying she was heading over to meet Jonah and Chip, he rushed over to your house and played that trick to get the Elucidator. He told it—"

"Wait," Angela interrupted, frowning. "How did Gavin know I had an Elucidator in the first place? And how did he know where I live?"

"He followed you home that night you saw him and his friends vandalizing a shed," Tida told her. "He recognized you from the time cave and figured you might have an Elucidator that he'd eventually be able to steal. And what do you know, that very night Hadley handed you an Elucidator right in plain view of Gavin, who was watching from outside your house."

Angela remembered that the window shade had been open that night, until she'd pulled it down right before Hadley left.

"After that night, he knew where you lived and that you had an Elucidator, so he biked over to your house whenever he got the chance and spied on you. He was hoping you'd set the Elucidator down somewhere and he'd be able to snatch it. Since that didn't work, he had to resort to the other method."

No wonder Angela had felt like she was being spied on. It hadn't been the time agency—at least not entirely. It had been Gavin.

"Anyway," Tida continued. "Gavin told the Elucidator to take him to the time cave because he knew you wouldn't be able to immediately follow, and because he knew it had been set up as a time hollow. Once he was in the cave, he typed in the code, and the Elucidator brought him to the place where Jonah, Chip, Daniella, and Katherine were walking and talking together. He grabbed them and shouted his command, but instead of bringing them all to the future, the Elucidator brought them to 1918."

"1918?" Angela stared at Tida, confused. "Why?"

"Because Gary and Hodge had been paying more attention to JB than he thought. They realized they _had_ made holes in history, and that they _did_ need to fix them before bringing the kids to the future. The Romanov one was especially bad. They had snatched Anastasia and Alexei hours before they were supposed to be herded with the rest of their family into the cellar to be executed. Their grand plan was to have Daniella and Gavin live out their last several hours as Anastasia and Alexei, with the help of Jonah, Chip, and Katherine, since those three had traveled through time before." Tida shook her head disapprovingly. "Then, right at the very last moment, they would snatch the kids out of time and send them on their way to be turned into babies and sold in the present."

"But… their plan didn't work, did it?" Angela asked, half afraid to hear the answer. Would Tida even care if the kids had been taken to the future, as long as they had fixed the holes made in history?

"No," Tida answered. "Gary and Hodge did arrive in the cellar, freezing time just as the first shot was fired. They did send the kids on their way to the future and started un-aging them. But the kids managed to get the Elucidator to send them back, so they wouldn't un-age all the way down to infanthood. Then one of the kids decided to turn all the Romanovs invisible, and that was such a change in history that it set off the alarms at headquarters. As soon as JB saw what was going on, he went in without consulting anybody else. He could have died," she added disgustedly.

Angela frowned at Tida's derision. "But he was trying to save the kids," she pointed out. "He _did_ save them… right?"

"He did," Tida assured her. But there was something about the way she said it, the way she didn't look Angela in the eye, that made Angela wonder whether she was telling the truth.

"Are you sure?" she asked Tida.

"Well… a lot of that time had become damaged as a result of Gary and Hodge's actions, so he wasn't able to get in immediately after the shooting started. Two of the kids were shot. But they're going to be all right."

"Two of the kids were _shot_?" gasped Angela. "Who?"

"Gavin and Jonah. But they're recovering nicely. Gavin's wounds probably would have killed him if he'd had to be treated in the twenty-first century—actually, they definitely would have, because of his hemophilia. But in the modern age, medical care is a lot better."

Tida was back to slamming the twenty-first century, but Angela had more important things to worry about. "Can I see them? Gavin and Jonah and the others? Are they here?"

"Of course they're not here. They're at the hospital."

"Can I visit them in the hospital?"

Tida opened her mouth to answer, but then cocked her head, as if listening to something Angela couldn't hear. "Authorized," she said.

The door opened and Kylin stepped into the room. "Hi Angela," she said with a smile, but she looked a lot more worried and subdued than she'd been the last time Angela had seen her.

"Hi Kylin," Angela replied.

"Has Tida filled you in on what happened in 1918?" Kylin asked.

Angela nodded. "I was just wondering if I could visit everybody in the hospital." She figured that regardless of what Tida had been about to say, Kylin would be more likely to grant her request.

But Kylin was shaking her head. "Probably at some point, but not right now. JB will be done consulting the charts in a couple minutes, and he wanted me to bring you to his office so he can talk with you."


	36. Chapter 36

"Finally," huffed Tida. "I'm going to go see if they need me for anything important."

Kylin made a face at Tida's retreating back. "I'm so sorry it had to be her who came and got you," she apologized to Angela. "The alternative was sending her on a mission with one of the kids, and we really didn't want to do that. We figured you'd be able to handle her better than some poor thirteen-year-old going on his or her first trip through time."

This was news to Angela. "You're sending more kids back in time?"

"We have no choice." Kylin gave her a sideways look. "How much did Tida tell you?"

Angela summarized what Tida had told her, from Gavin conspiring with Gary and Hodge to JB rescuing everyone and bringing them to the hospital.

"Oh. So she didn't tell you…" Kylin winced. "As soon as Jonah turned the Romanovs invisible, Gary and Hodge knew we'd be alerted that something was going on. So they left. They didn't even bother to take the kids with them. The kids all would have died if it hadn't been for JB's quick thinking." She shuddered, then continued. "It's been two weeks since all that happened, and we still haven't found Gary and Hodge. We've got people and computers searching all of history, in every geographical location, and every time hollow ever created, and so far we've had no luck."

Angela wasn't surprised. Of course the time agency hadn't found Gary and Hodge. They still had yet to kidnap someone in 1932.

Should she tell Kylin what she knew? Or would that mess up time?

"Gary and Hodge's disappearance puts all thirty-six of the Missing in grave danger," Kylin went on. "We now have agents watching each and every one of them at all times. We have our system set to sound an alarm the moment Gary or Hodge makes an appearance anywhere in the world between 2012 and 2112. We have shield barriers and arrival detectors and remote-travel prohibitors and a whole bunch of other security measures that Gary and Hodge shouldn't be able to get past. But," she shrugged helplessly. "They weren't supposed to have been able to break out of time prison either, so really anything is possible."

"So… I'm still not sure I understand," Angela confessed. "With all this that's going on, wouldn't it make more sense to wait until Gary and Hodge have been caught before you start sending kids back in time again?"

"It's kind of a catch-22," said Kylin. She pulled her Elucidator out of her pocket and glanced at it. "JB's waiting for you, so I'll tell you as we're walking."

Kylin led the way out of the room, into a long white hallway that seemed somehow different from anywhere Angela had been before, including the room she'd just come from.

 _Oh yeah,_ Angela realized. _Where's the light coming from?_ The windowless hallway was well-lit, but Angela saw no sign of lights on the ceiling or walls.

In spite of all that was happening with time and Gary and Hodge and the kids, Angela felt a little thrill of excitement. _I'm at Time Agency headquarters. This is the actual future!_

"What Gary and Hodge just did—kidnapping Gavin, Daniella, Jonah, Chip, and Katherine and then leaving them to die in 1918 when things didn't work out how they'd planned—proved to the entire agency what some of us have known all along. That Gary and Hodge are careless, reckless, and don't care about anything at all except making money," Kylin began explaining. "As much as we'd like to hold off on returning the rest of the kids to their original identities until we're more confident in our knowledge of the advanced concepts of time travel, we don't have the luxury of waiting anymore. If Gary and Hodge do manage to get past all our security measures and kidnap anyone, they'll do one of two things. They'll either take the kid to the future without fixing the past, or they'll make another lousy attempt at fixing the past, like they did with 1918. Either option would be disastrous."

Angela thought she understood what Kylin was getting at. "So you're trying to stay a step ahead of them. You're fixing the past as quickly as you can because it's a better alternative than Gary and Hodge trying to do it."

Kylin nodded. "Exactly. I can't say I really _like_ this arrangement—it kind of feels like we're playing right into Gary and Hodge's hands—but no matter how little we know about time travel, it's better for the kids to go back in time with us than with Gary and Hodge. At least we actually _care_ about the kids."

"How many kids have you already returned?" Angela asked as she and Kylin turned right and began walking down another hallway.

"Counting the nine who had already had their turns back in time before we started this… I think we're up to twenty-three now. I went with Sarah earlier this morning, and JB was able to do Ming and Xavier in one day, because both of their missions were pretty short… oh, looks like Marrison's back from returning Denton."

The elderly time agent Angela remembered being introduced as Marrison Wrenley had just stepped out of a room and was wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. "Three days in 480 B.C.!" he exclaimed. "And then I had to consult the time charts and make sure everything worked out, which took forever because of how bogged down the system is… but Denton's back home safe and sound, with everything about his past resolved. And I'm ready for a shower and a nap!"

"Go home and rest," Kylin advised him. "Ariti's standing by, ready to take over your post."

"Will do," Marrison replied. "And I'll be back at seven sharp next morning for guard duty. Hi and bye, Angela." He gave Angela a smile and a nod as he passed by.

Angela opened her mouth to ask Kylin who Denton Price had been in 480 B.C., but at that moment, Kylin stopped at one of the doors. "This is JB's office," she said. "He should be ready for you… JB, it's Kylin and Angela." She seemed to be speaking directly to the door.

The door opened, and Angela followed Kylin into a spacious room that only slightly resembled the offices Angela had seen in the twenty-first century. One entire wall was covered with what looked like digital charts and graphs that were constantly fluctuating. The opposite wall contained a bookshelf and a few framed photographs. The picture nearest to Angela was of JB as a teenager—she recognized him from the videos of Tete, although he looked much better put-together here—with the parents she recognized from the adoption video and a boy who must have been the teenage version of JB's older brother. There was a window on the back wall, but all Angela could see out of it was sky. In front of the window was the real JB, sitting at a desk, his fingers moving as if he was typing, though Angela couldn't see a keyboard.

JB looked much more composed than he had the last time Angela had seen him. Hopefully that meant he'd had time to come to terms with the idea of being Tete Einstein. Angela wanted to ask him about that, about how he was doing, but she didn't want to be untactful. Besides, now probably wasn't the best time.

JB looked up. "Angela! Clearly you survived the briefing with Tida," he said with the ghost of a smile on his face. Angela got the feeling that Tida's unpleasantness was something of a running joke among the other time agents.

"I survived," she agreed, grinning back. "Kylin said you wanted to talk to me?"

"Yes, I do. Why don't you sit down."

Angela sat down in one of the chairs facing JB's desk. Kylin hovered next to her, as if unsure whether she should stay or leave.

"You're welcome to stay too, Kylin," JB told her. "You're always welcome in my office."

Angela caught the way the corners of Kylin's mouth turned up at those words, and the slight pink tone that came into her beige cheeks.

"Close the door," JB instructed. Angela was halfway out of her seat to do it when she realized the door was closing on its own.

"Sorry," JB apologized. "I was talking to the door itself—never mind, that's not important. Tida and Kylin told you everything?"

"Not about Maria and Leonid," Kylin spoke up before Angela had a chance to answer. "I wasn't sure if you wanted her to know about them before you talked with her."

Angela racked her brain, wondering who Maria and Leonid could be and why they were important. There was a Maria who was one of the Missing, but the name Leonid didn't ring any bells at all.

"Okay," said JB. "So Angela, you know about Katherine rescuing the others from the basement?"

"Katherine?" Angela raised her eyebrows. "I thought you were the one who rescued everyone."

"I rescued Jonah and Katherine initially, because they were the only ones who I could grab," JB explained. "I only had thirty seconds, and I knew I had to get to Jonah because he'd been shot. Katherine was the only other one close enough for me to reach within the time I had. Of course, once they found out that their friends had been left behind in 1918, they wanted to make sure everyone else got rescued. So I brought them to the Time Council meeting, where everyone was discussing what was to be done, and… long story short, Katherine ended up being the only one who had a chance at rescuing anyone from that shooting gallery." He grimaced. "It still gives me nightmares when I think about what could have gone wrong, but fortunately, she was able to get in and out without being harmed. And she was able to rescue not only Chip, Gavin, and Daniella, but also Gavin and Daniella's older sister, Maria Romanova, and the Romanovs' kitchen boy, Leonid Sednev."

"That's good," Angela said firmly, studying JB's face in an attempt to figure out whether he shared her opinion. JB's belief that people from the past should be left in the past to live out their original destiny had definitely lessened since Angela had first met him—how could it not, especially with what he'd recently found out about his own history—but she wasn't sure to what extent. The Romanov family had been pretty influential in history—what if JB thought rescuing an additional family member would have too much of an impact on time?

But JB was nodding. "It is good," he agreed. "Maria was supposed to die that night, just as Anastasia and Alexei were. All three of them were pulled out at the last possible minute, meaning that there were no holes left by their disappearance. Leonid was supposed to live for several more years, but our analysts checked out the situation and found no problems with his early departure. And the remains Gary and Hodge faked were convincing enough that nobody will know the truth until the year—well, until many hundreds of years later."

"So everything's been worked out?" Angela asked, unsure of why JB was telling her this. She was glad to know, of course, and honored that the time agents were keeping her in the loop. But at a time when the whole agency seemed so stressed out and had so many different things going on, she found it odd that JB was taking the time to meet face to face with her and fill in the details—especially since she'd already had the chance to be briefed by both Tida and Kylin.

"Almost," JB replied, and something in his tone indicated that whatever he was about to say was the real reason he'd wanted to speak with her. "We're still trying to work out a placement for Maria and Leonid—when and where they're going to live. Obviously, it would be ideal if we could place them in the twenty-first century, someplace where they'll still be able to get together with Daniella and Gavin. Daniella has already requested multiple times for Maria to move in with her, but given the fact that Daniella's parents aren't even aware that there's such a thing as time travel, and would have dozens of questions about how Daniella and Maria met and how they know they're sisters… that's not a possibility quite yet."

"Hmm," Angela frowned, thinking. "How old are they? Maria and Leonid?"

"Maria is nineteen and Leonid is fifteen. They both speak English—Maria more so than Leonid, but Leonid can still carry on a conversation and understand most of what's being said around him—and the other kids will of course be happy to fill them in on all the historical events and technological developments that have occurred between 1918 and 2012." JB took a deep breath. "What I was thinking—and it's totally your choice whether to say yes or no; I haven't mentioned this to the kids yet—I was thinking maybe Maria and Leonid could live with you for a little while. At least a couple months, and then we can work on making other arrangements."

Angela blinked. The idea of Maria and Leonid living with her hadn't even crossed her mind. But—it made sense. Angela knew about time travel. She had some idea of what the kids had had to go through before ending up here. That was more than she could say for any other adult in the twenty-first century.

Angela tried to imagine what it would be like having two teenagers living in her house. She'd have to make meals for them. She'd have to buy clothes for them. She'd have to share the bathroom with them. She'd be the one responsible for their education, for helping them find jobs if they wanted to start earning money, for teaching them about the twenty-first century. Not to mention how weird it would be just having them in the house. Angela hadn't lived with another person for thirteen years.

She pondered what this must feel like for Maria and Leonid, being brought to live thousands of miles and a hundred years away from everyone and everything they'd ever known. Angela had been around Maria's age when she'd first moved to Liston to take the SkyTrails job, and she remembered feeling homesick sometimes, missing her family and her hometown. But her family had always been just a phone call away, and if she really missed them, she could hop in her car and drive the hundred miles to Mayville whenever she felt like it.

That wouldn't be an option for Maria and Leonid.

"That's fine," she told JB. "They can live with me."

"They can?" JB's face brightened. "Are you sure? I don't want you to feel pressured into doing this. We can always look at other options if necessary."

"No, I want this. It's perfect. They won't have to worry about hiding the fact that they're from the past when they're with me, and I can make sure they get to visit Daniella and Gavin. They can stay with me for as long as they want."

JB and Kylin both let out audible sighs of relief. "You don't know how much this helps, you saying yes," said JB. "We were really worried that we weren't going to find a placement for them… okay, so let's just work some things out here."

They talked about the logistics of how things would go—when JB returned all the kids to the twenty-first century, Angela would drive over to pick Leonid and Maria up and bring them to their new home. The time agency would drop off beds and a few changes of clothes for them at Angela's house, and provide all the necessary documents to get Leonid into Liston High School and Maria enrolled as a part-time University of Ohio student. "The fact that they're Russian really makes this easier," Kylin commented, scrolling through the notes she'd been taking on her Elucidator. "They can tell everyone they just moved from Russia, and people won't find it totally weird that they're not 'in the know' about a lot of American pop culture stuff."

"Good old twenty-first century Americans," JB grinned, a playful look in his eyes. "We can definitely play off of their belief that everywhere else in the world is so strange and different that foreigners don't even know what a cell phone is."

"Hey!" Angela protested teasingly. "We don't think like that!"

"I know. I was just kidding. Your time period is actually a lot better-informed than most people give them credit for," JB conceded. He went back to drumming his fingers on the desk, or typing on his invisible keyboard, or whatever he'd been doing before. "Kylin mentioned you wanted to visit the kids in the hospital?"

"Yes," said Angela, remembering what she'd been told about their injuries. "Can I?"

"Well, it's actually only Jonah and Gavin who are still in the hospital by now; the rest of them are being given some time to heal psychologically in a nearby time hollow. But yeah, I think that would be great, having you pay them all a visit. Getting to meet Maria and Leonid." He picked up his Elucidator. "I just have to check and see whether this is a good time to visit Jonah and Gavin," he explained.

"How long do they have to stay in the hospital?" Angela wanted to know.

"Probably a couple more weeks. We need to make sure the bullet wounds heal enough that their parents don't notice when they return to the twenty-first century, and of course give them time to come to terms with everything they saw back in that cellar." He shook his head. "I've traveled to a lot of bad places during my career, but I'd never been anywhere as awful as that nightmare in 19—" He broke off, his face suddenly turning pale.

"What's wrong?" Angela asked.

JB didn't answer. Angela glanced at Kylin, who also looked baffled and concerned by JB's behavior. "JB?" said Kylin, when he continued to not speak.

"1918," he finally finished, his eyes wide with alarm. "I went to 1918. I was there, in that cellar, getting Jonah and Katherine out. I spent thirty seconds in 1918."

Angela looked at Kylin again, wondering if she understood what JB was getting at. But Kylin looked just as perplexed as Angela was.

"It shouldn't have been allowed! It shouldn't have been _possible_ for me to go to 1918!" JB yelled, his voice bordering on hysteria. Feverishly, he started typing something into his Elucidator.

"JB, what's going—" Kylin started to say, but JB turned his Elucidator around so the two women could see it and stabbed his finger at the screen.

"There," he announced, his voice shaking. "There's the proof. I duplicated myself in time."


	37. Chapter 37

Angela leaned closer to peer at the screen. It looked like it was displaying a map of the world, or at least part of the world—Europe and part of Asia? At the top of the screen was a time stamp: 1918-07-17. 2:56:53. Glowing on the map were two red dots, one in Switzerland and one in Russia. The Switzerland dot was labeled EDUARD "TETE" EINSTEIN. The Russia dot was labeled EDUARD "TETE" EINSTEIN/ALONZO ALFRED ALYSSIUS "JB" T'KAH.

"See?" said JB. "I was in that cellar, rescuing Jonah and Katherine, at the same time as the eight-year-old version of me as Tete Einstein was in Switzerland living his life. That's not supposed to be able to happen! Something like this has only happened once before, and that was when—" he broke off, too horrified to continue.

Angela remembered being told about the other instance in which someone had been duplicated in time. It had been Dalton Sullivan, hadn't it? Second had placed him in the Native American village in 1605, even though he'd already lived through 1605 as John Hudson in England? And that had been possible because…

"Time was coming apart," Kylin finished out loud.

The three of them stared at each other, letting Kylin's statement sink in. _Does this mean time is coming apart now?_ Angela wondered.

She realized that it wasn't "right now" they were talking about; it was 1918. And hadn't Kylin said that she and the other time agents had already lived through two weeks of life in their time since JB had rescued the kids from 1918?

Didn't that have to mean that nothing bad had resulted from JB being duplicated in time?

"Tida said that Gary and Hodge's actions created some Damaged Time, and that's why you only had thirty seconds to get in and out," Angela remembered. "Could that have been why you were able to be duplicated? The Damaged Time?"

"Maybe," said JB. "But last time, in 1605, it wasn't just the Damaged Time. It was all that other stuff Second did too, with the time smack and altering original time and then splitting time into two separate dimensions… we still don't understand exactly how all that stuff fit together and which events were the ones that made other events possible. All I can say is, if time was already messed up enough to allow two versions of me to be in the world at the same time, then that on top of me making it so there _were_ two versions of me at the same time, and all the disruptions of Katherine and me going in and out, and pulling Leonid and the three youngest Romanovs out of their time period permanently… there's no telling what all that ended up doing to time. What it might still be doing."

"I'm not seeing anything," Kylin spoke up, poring over her Elucidator screen. "But—the whole next few years are kind of hazy, just like that span from 1600 to 1611 was. Actually, it looks like it's hazy all the way up through Angela's native time period."

JB stared at Kylin, then consulted his own Elucidator. His head jerked up and he directed his gaze toward Angela. "I'm sorry, Angela, I know I said you could visit the kids, but I don't think that's going to work out now. We need to get you back to the twenty-first century as quickly as possible."

"What? Why?"

"Because the entire twentieth century is in flux now, and the twenty-first century was already in flux, and having anyone missing from their native time creates small disturbances that contribute to the grander scope of things. And of course there are already a lot of ins and outs happening in your time period as we travel there to get each of the kids, and as we pull them out to send them back in time, and as we return them to the twenty-first century afterwards. I know you're just one person, but even one person can be the tipping point during a crisis like this."

JB started typing commands into his Elucidator. Everything was suddenly happening so fast. If JB sent Angela home right now, she'd be back in the twenty-first century without an Elucidator. Which would be bad ordinarily, but completely unacceptable today, considering tomorrow was November 21st.

"Wait!" Angela exclaimed.

JB looked up. "What?"

"Can I—" Angela hesitated before finishing her request. The note had explicitly said to not let JB know she had an Elucidator with her on the morning of the 21st. As of right now, since the Elucidator Gavin had stolen was probably in time agency custody, JB would meet up with her on the 21st thinking she didn't have an Elucidator at all.

And that was how it was supposed to go.

"Can I see Hadley before I leave?" she asked instead.

JB opened his mouth, then glanced over at Kylin, who had moved over to the wall that had all the charts and graphs. His expression softened slightly and he nodded. "His office is next door," he told Angela. "To the left. Say your goodbyes and then have him send you back to the twenty-first century to pick up Maria and Leonid."

Angela nodded. "I'll see you later," she said to JB and Kylin, and hurried to the door. "Open the door?" she tried, and the door opened for her.

She turned left and knocked on the door next to JB's. Nothing happened. "Hadley?" she said, remembering how Kylin had spoken to JB's door. "Um, it's Angela. Can I come in?"

The door opened into a room much like JB's office, but with different furniture and décor. Hadley was just getting up from his desk, and his worried frown turned into a full-faced smile when he saw Angela. "Angela! It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you too," Angela replied, and for a moment she forgot why she was there. She would be perfectly happy to just stand there and look at Hadley for a few minutes, or hours, or possibly days.

But she didn't have that luxury. "Close the door," she said, and the door closed behind her.

Hadley laughed. "I see you've already got the hang of this time period's technology."

Angela laughed with him, but quickly sobered up. "Hadley, JB said I have to get back to the twenty-first century as soon as possible, but I needed to ask you a favor first. I know it's my fault Gavin was able to take the last Elucidator you gave me—"

"It wasn't your fault," Hadley disagreed. "You were just trying to do your job. How were you to know Gavin was working for Gary and Hodge?"

Angela shrugged. "I still feel bad about it. It was my Elucidator that ended up freeing Gary and Hodge and putting all those kids in danger." She took a deep breath. "Anyhow, I was wondering if it would be possible for you to get me a replacement Elucidator. A—another replacement," she amended, remembering that the one Gavin had taken had been her second.

All the laughter went out from Hadley's face. "Angela… I wish I could. I think it's important for you to have one. But after what happened with Gavin, we received strict orders from Central Office that we are not, under any circumstances, allowed to let any Elucidator be used by anyone who's not a certified time agent. We've even all been mandated to change our passcodes and upgrade our security settings. It's not your fault," he added quickly. "It's just an extra precaution we're taking because of Gary and Hodge."

Angela could see why the time agency would make that argument. Angela's possession of an Elucidator had been the catalyst not only for everything that had just happened in 1918, but also for Jonah and Katherine going back into 1903 and being caught by Mileva Einstein. Although, she couldn't help thinking, there might not even _be_ time anymore if that particular time-travel trip hadn't happened.

But it didn't matter what the new rules or precautions were. Angela having an Elucidator tomorrow morning may turn out to be just as important as it had been for Mileva to learn about time travel.

Angela felt her pockets and realized she didn't have her wallet with her. "I have to show you something," she told Hadley. "It's at my house. It's really important. Trust me."

Hadley locked eyes with her, and she knew he trusted her. "All right," he said. "I'll come to your house and see whatever it is you want to show me. But—" He checked his Elucidator. "I don't think we'll have time to do that just yet. You're supposed to be on Jonah and Chip's street by 5:22pm, and you closed the door of the time cave at 5:14pm. Eight minutes is just enough time for you to drive over from the parking garage on Main Street where we've placed your car, but you won't have time to do anything else until after you've picked up Maria and Leonid."

That was a good point. "So… what, you'll come over later? After I've picked them up and brought them home?"

"I'll give you all a couple hours to get to know each other, and for them to get situated, as long as whatever you want to show me isn't too urgent," Hadley decided. "Is it?"

"It's very urgent that you see it tonight," Angela told him. "The actual time doesn't matter, but it has to still be November 20th, 2012. And… you probably shouldn't tell anyone else at the time agency about this."

Hadley looked worried, but he nodded. "How about nine o'clock?"

"Nine o'clock. You can just meet me in the kitchen? I'll make sure I shut the shades this time."

Hadley agreed, and Angela silently prayed that nothing would go wrong in the three and a half hours in which she would be without an Elucidator. What if another emergency came up and Hadley wasn't able to come? What if all the time disturbances JB had been talking about made it so the next twelve or twenty-four hours were Damaged Time? What if November 21 had been a mistake and the person who'd written the note had actually meant to write November 20?

Hadley was still maintaining eye contact with her, and Angela found that if she focused on the depth of his gaze, she could calm down enough to breathe. Hadley believed that this would all work out. Sure, he didn't yet know about the note, but he was an experienced time agent who had a pretty good idea of the way time disturbances and Damaged Time worked. And he trusted her.

She would have to trust him too.


	38. Chapter 38

The seven kids had already arrived by the time Angela turned onto the Skidmores' street. She could see their silhouettes up ahead in the fading sunlight—three of them sprinting away, the remaining four diving for the bushes on the side of the road. Angela drove slowly until she reached the bushes, then shifted into Park and rolled her window down. "Maria?" she spoke softly. "Leonid?"

The first to emerge from the bushes was the girl Angela recognized as Daniella McCarthy, followed by an unfamiliar boy and girl who must have been Leonid and Maria, and finally, Gavin. Gavin made eye contact with Angela for a split second before shifting his gaze to the ground. "Hey, I'm sorry for, you know, tricking you and stealing your Elucidator. And for spying on you. And all the other rotten stuff I did. I was a total idiot. And selfish."

"It's all in the past now," Angela reassured him, slightly surprised at how much he seemed to have changed from the sneering, angry rebel she'd known him as before. _Well,_ she reminded herself, _going back in time and becoming Alexei Romanov, and then being betrayed by Gary and Hodge and narrowly escaping death in the cellar, and then spending however many weeks recovering in the future… all that stuff was bound to have a lasting impact on him._

Gavin nodded. "I'm not working with Gary and Hodge anymore. I'm going to help you guys catch them, if I can."

"Me too, if I get the chance," Daniella added. "By the way, we haven't met because I wasn't in the time cave with everyone else. I'm Daniella. This is my sister Maria, and this is our good friend Leonid."

"Leo," Leonid corrected. "I'd like to be known as Leo here."

"It's nice to meet you all," said Angela. "I'm Angela. I'm friends with JB and Jonah and Katherine."

"We know," said Maria. "Katherine showed us some video clips of you while we were in the time hollow. On—YouTube?"

"Not YouTube," Daniella negated, shaking her head. "YouTube was the funny cat videos and the movie trailers, remember? We watched Angela on—well, whatever time-traveler thing we watched parts of our own lives on. I don't know what it was called. We don't have access to it anymore now that we're in the twenty-first century."

Angela really wanted to know what "videos" they'd watched of her—thirteen years' worth of her doing the same thing every day? The last few weeks of her _spying_ on all the kids?—but now wasn't the time to ask. "It's starting to get dark," she pointed out. "We should probably all start heading home. Daniella, Gavin, do either of you need a ride?"

They both shook their heads. "I'm good, but before you leave, do you have a pen and a piece of paper so I can give Maria my cell phone number?" Daniella asked.

Angela found the materials Daniella had asked for, and Daniella and Gavin both wrote their numbers down for Maria and Leo. "Angela can show you guys how to use modern phones," Gavin told them. "You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly."

The kids said their goodbyes to each other, and then Leo and Maria got into the backseat of Angela's car, and Gavin and Daniella started walking away.

 _Wait—should I have insisted that I drive them to their houses?_ Angela thought suddenly. _Should I pull up next to them right now and tell them they have to get in the car, for their safety?_ Gary and Hodge were on the loose, and Angela didn't even have an Elucidator to monitor Gavin and Daniella remotely…

She remembered what Kylin had told her about all the safety measures that had been put into place—a personal time agent to watch each individual kid, and some sort of sensor to notify the time agency if Gary or Hodge entered the twenty-first century—and decided that Gavin and Daniella would most likely be fine. Besides, JB had told her to pick up Maria and Leonid and bring them straight home. He hadn't said anything about the others.

It was maddening, not having an Elucidator she could use to call JB and make sure.

"So," Leo spoke up as Angela shifted the car into Drive. "We are going to your house, is that correct?"

"Yes," Angela answered, starting to drive. "It's going to be your house too."

"Do you live all by yourself?" Maria asked.

"I did," Angela told her. "And just the other day I was thinking about how quiet and lonely it was starting to feel. I'm glad I'll have you guys now to keep me company."

"The tsa—Ale— _Gavin_ said we get to go to school here," said Leo. "I have never been to school before, though I know how to read and write. Gavin said I will get to take an assortment of classes."

"You will," Angela assured him. "There are a lot of classes you can choose from, based on what you're interested in. And in a couple years, after you graduate, there will be even more options available for what you want to do with the rest of your life."

"They said we can become whatever we want," Maria said, a little dazedly. "Leonid doesn't have to be a cook forever if he doesn't want to. _I_ can have a career if I so choose." She laughed like she couldn't believe it. "Of course, I would much prefer just to marry a kind, handsome man and raise a large family. Which they said is also a possibility here."

"Anything is possible for us here," whispered Leo, and Angela felt a surge of protectiveness for both of them as they sat there, hope and wonder mixing in their expressions as they stared out the windows at all the twenty-first century sights passing by.

 _I will take good care of them,_ Angela promised herself. _I'm their mother figure now. I have hardly any experience taking care of other people, and zero experience being a mother. But I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that they have the opportunity to lead great lives here in the twenty-first century._

"I'm sorry it's so small," Angela apologized as she, Maria, and Leo stepped into her house. She had bought the house ten years ago, back when her life had consisted of research, research, and more research. It had only a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and two small bedrooms, one of which Angela had used as an office.

"Leo, you'll sleep in here," Angela told him, turning on the light in the room that had formerly been the office. The time agents apparently had already stopped by, because the desk had been moved to the side to make room for a bed and a small chest of drawers.

"It's nice," Leo commented, looking around at everything. "Much better than my old sleeping quarters. More—complete."

Angela then opened the door to her own room, to which an additional bed had been added for Maria. Angela, JB, and Kylin had decided together that Maria and Leonid would probably both find this sleeping arrangement the most acceptable, given the available options. "You'll be sharing my room. I hope that's all right," she told Maria.

Maria smiled. "I've shared a room with at least one of my sisters practically all my life. I don't mind." Her smile suddenly faded, replaced by a heavy sort of sadness, probably triggered by thoughts about her sisters.

Angela opened the closet, revealing an assortment of dresses, each a different modern style. "The time agency dropped off several twenty-first century outfits for each of you," she told Maria and Leo. "Dresses for you, because they figured that's what you'd be most comfortable in right now," she added, looking at Maria. "But you're welcome to try on any of my clothes. They probably won't fit, but they'll give you an idea of what else is available for you in this time period. And I can take you both shopping tomor—" she broke off, remembering what tomorrow was. "I can take you both shopping at some point coming up, so you can pick out more clothes if you don't like what we have here," she amended.

"At Wal-Mart?" Leo asked, and Angela had to laugh. Clearly JB had been right about the other kids filling these two in about twenty-first century America.

"Sure, maybe at Wal-Mart," she said. "That's a good place to start."

Angela gave Maria and Leo some time to settle in to their new rooms and adjust to their surroundings, then brought them to a buffet for dinner. Their eyes widened at all the choices. "It's been a long time since I've seen this much food," commented Maria.

"Do people in this time period go to places like this for all their meals?" Leo wanted to know.

"No, most of the time we cook our own food and eat at home. I just brought you here because I don't know what you like yet and we don't have a lot to choose from at home right now," Angela explained, making a mental note to go grocery shopping as soon as she got the chance.

"Once we get more food at our new home, I can cook the meals," Leo offered.

"You can if you want to, but you don't have to," Angela told him. "I can cook meals for us too. Maria may even want to cook something sometime."

When everyone had eaten their fill and Leo had declared the meal "a spectacular feast", they headed home once more and sat around awkwardly, not really sure how to pass the time. Then Maria asked if Angela had any playing cards, and, relieved to have found something to do, Angela rummaged around in a drawer of odds and ends and found some. They played several card games, and then Angela checked her watch and saw that it was 8:52. _See?_ she told herself. _That wasn't so bad, all that time without an Elucidator. And now Hadley will be here in eight minutes, and he'll give you one for tomorrow._

As long as he was able to show up.

As long as he was able to procure an Elucidator for her without alerting the rest of the time agency or getting in trouble.

What was going to happen tomorrow, anyway?

Angela found she could no longer concentrate on the card game. "I'm expecting someone at nine," she told Maria and Leo. "I'm going to call it quits for now, but you two can keep playing."

Leonid eyed the TV on the wall. "Is that the thing the other kids were calling a TV? Can we see what's on there?"

"Sure," Angela replied, handing him the remote. "Press this button to turn it on, and then you can use these buttons to get to the different channels."

As Leo and Maria experimented with the TV, Angela went to her bedroom and found her wallet. She took out the note from her first and only day at SkyTrails, wrinkled and worn now from all the times she'd read it over the years, wondering what it could possibly mean. Now she knew what it meant. All of it. And tomorrow was the day she'd been speculating about for nearly thirteen years.

She headed back out to the kitchen, where she sat down and checked her watch again. 8:57. He should be arriving in three minutes. Well, if her watch was set to official, time-agency standard time, which it probably wasn't. So he could actually be arriving at any moment now.

And suddenly, without any warning, there he was. Standing over by the refrigerator. Angela jumped, startled by his appearance even though she'd been expecting him.

"I'm sorry!" He held his hands up in a show of innocence. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"It's fine," Angela said, getting up and going over to him. "Thank you for coming."

"Are the kids settling in okay?"

Angela peeked over to where Maria and Leo sat on the couch, both enraptured by whatever was happening on the TV screen. "They seem fine."

"That's good." Hadley shuffled his feet, and Angela knew that regardless of how good it felt to have him here visiting her, he probably had other, more important things to be doing right now. She cut right to the chase.

"I told you I had something to show you," she said, unfolding the note and handing it over to him. "Here it is. Someone gave it to me that night at the airport, before the plane appeared with all the babies."

Hadley took the note and read it, his expression becoming more serious by the second. "Do you remember who gave it to you?" he asked.

Angela shook her head. "Not really. It was a young teenage boy… I think he had a baby with him… he was wearing weird clothes… but I don't remember his face at all." She looked up at Hadley. "Do you think it could have been one of the Missing? Maybe Jonah?"

"I don't know," said Hadley, still staring at the note. "It's definitely someone who knows you now… which of the Missing have you had face-to-face contact with, outside of the time cave?"

"Mostly just Jonah," Angela answered. "A little bit with Chip, and Gavin just recently… actually, wait, I wonder if it's Gavin. He had an Elucidator; he could have gone back to 1999 before letting Gary and Hodge out of time prison… but wait, that wouldn't make any sense."

"He didn't go anywhere other than the time cave, Jonah's street, and 1918 with that Elucidator," said Hadley. "Besides, judging by this note, it sounds like you and this boy and JB are going to end up in a situation tomorrow where you'll need an Elucidator, and _then_ he's going to go to the scene of the time crash and give this note to you."

"Like what happened with JB and Jonah and Katherine when Second messed up the 1600s," Angela realized. "Or even the situation with Mileva."

"Right." Hadley's face was grim. "My bet's on Jonah. It's always Jonah."

Angela thought about the exact way the previous two situations had had to work out in order to avoid causing paradoxes. "So, when I see JB and Jonah tomorrow… I know I can't mention the note or the Elucidator, but what _can_ I do? When I'm faced with making a choice… how will I know what's the right thing to do to without ruining time?"

She realized these were the exact same questions JB had been wondering about after finding out he was Tete Einstein.

Hadley looked just as flummoxed as Angela felt. "I don't know," he answered. "I guess you'll just have to go with your gut and trust that everything will work out the way it's supposed to."

They were quiet for a moment, the only sound around being artificial audience laughter in whatever show Maria and Leo had decided to watch. Then Hadley pulled out his Elucidator and consulted it. "I'll go to my native time period right now and get you an Elucidator. I just ran a quick projection on how likely it is that I'll be able to get back here without any time passing for you, and the chances are good. I just wanted to let you know in case… just in case."

Before Angela had a chance to respond, Hadley flickered out of sight. He was gone for barely an instant before he reappeared, holding what looked like an ID card attached to a lanyard. "This is your new Elucidator," he explained, handing it to her. "I figured a wearable form that you can keep hidden under your clothes would be less conspicuous than a cell phone lookalike that would change into something else when you got to 1932. Of course, this will still change form when you enter a new time period, but it'll change into a necklace or something similar."

Angela hung the lanyard around her neck.

"I'll be monitoring your travels," Hadley assured her. "I linked that Elucidator to the workstation in my office. None of the other time agents will be able to see what's happening, but I'll be receiving live updates. You can contact me if you need to, but I'm not going to intervene unless it's absolutely necessary." He frowned. "Of course, with all the uncertainty surrounding this mission, and all the uncertainty regarding time in general… I really don't know what will turn out to be possible."

Angela nodded, trying not to let Hadley see how nervous she was. _None of us know what this mission is or how it's going to turn out,_ she thought. _Or how disastrous to time it will be if I make one wrong move. Or how long I'll be away…_ She remembered how JB had gotten stuck in the 1600s for five years. _What if something like that happens to me?_

She took a deep breath and gazed at Hadley, trying to memorize his face. Who knew how long it would be before she saw him again? "I'll bring the Elucidator to your office when I get back," she promised. "Or—you can come here and get it. However it works out." She smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. "I'll be fine."

"Yes, you will," Hadley agreed with conviction. "You're smart, you're brave, you're resourceful, and you care. Whatever you end up having to do, you'll do it well. I'm sure of it."

They stood there looking at each other for a long moment. Then Angela cleared her throat. "Well," she said. "I should probably let you get back to the time agency. I'll… see you later."

"Of course. Good luck on your mission—not that you'll need it." Hadley started extending his hand for a handshake, then changed his mind and went in for a hug instead. Angela gladly hugged him back, savoring the feeling of his arms around her. Holding onto his warm, sturdy frame, Angela felt truly safe for the first time since that fateful day at SkyTrails.

Eventually, they eased apart, but Angela wasn't quite ready to let go yet. She kept her arms around Hadley's shoulders and looked into his eyes.

Hadley tenderly brought his hand up to caress Angela's cheek. Then, ever so slowly, he leaned in and kissed her on the lips.

Angela closed her eyes and kissed him back, letting go of her worries about the kinds of decisions she'd have to make tomorrow and how she was going to rescue Jonah and JB and whether she would be able to avoid creating a paradox that would end all of time. Those were all things she would have to think about in the near future, but not right now.

For right now, she could just live in the moment.


End file.
